No Nepotism. No Pedigree.No Compromise: Anuparna Roy’s Venice Win Shatters Indian Cinema’s Old Order
- Sep 8
- 3 min read
Anuparna Roy’s Songs of Forgotten Trees has made history at the 82nd Venice Film Festival, where she became the first Indian filmmaker to win Best Director in the Orizzonti section. It’s a landmark moment, but not just because it adds another “first” to the national tally. Roy’s win signals a shift in the stories India tells, and who gets to tell them.
An Unlikely Path to Cinema
Roy doesn’t have the “right” last name or the “right” pedigree. She isn’t FTII-trained, nor a product of film industry dynasties. Before cinema, her CV listed call-center shifts and IT sales quotas—not assistant-director credits on big-budget sets. Her path into filmmaking was stitched together from determination, not inheritance.
That outsider status is more than a biographical detail—it’s part of what gives Songs of Forgotten Trees its urgency. Roy carries into her cinema the textures of lives often overlooked: the everyday compromises, quiet rebellions, and fleeting solidarities of women negotiating survival.
A Cinema Beyond Spectacle and Stereotypes
Her debut refuses the familiar packaging of Indian cinema on the global stage. This is not Bollywood extravagance. Nor is it “poverty porn” designed for Western applause. Instead, Roy gives us two migrant women in Mumbai, played by Naaz Shaikh and Sumi Baghel, navigating invisibility in a city that barely notices their existence. Their struggle is not romanticized, nor is it flattened into victimhood.
“Women in cinema are rarely seen as we are,” Roy has said. “We are often filtered through imposed political, religious, and social frameworks. My film resists that. It attempts to reclaim the space where women exist not as symbols or metaphors, but as themselves.”
The result is spare, intimate, and quietly radical. It doesn’t announce itself as political—but in its insistence on women’s subjectivity, it is.
A Voice That Doesn’t Play Safe
If there was any doubt that Roy is unwilling to dilute her voice, her Venice speech put it to rest. She dedicated her win to women everywhere and declared, “Every child deserves peace, freedom, liberation, and Palestine is no exception.”
In an industry where artists are often urged to stay neutral, Roy’s words cut through the choreography of acceptance speeches. She chose solidarity over safety, clarity over caution.
Significance for Indian Cinema
Indian independent cinema has deep roots, stretching back to Satyajit Ray and his generation. From Neecha Nagar by Chetan Anand winning the Palme d’Or (then the Grand Prix) in 1946, to Bimal Roy’s Do Bigha Zamin receiving the International Prize of the City of Cannes in 1953, Indian filmmakers have periodically made their mark on the global stage. Yet, despite these early milestones, recognition has often been sporadic, with long gaps before India’s next major international acclaim. In recent years, big wins like Payal Kapadia’s Cannes Grand Prix last year show that Indian independent cinema is finally receiving sustained international attention.
Roy’s victory is not only about recognition abroad—it’s a recalibration of how Indian cinema can be seen. For too long, its global perception has been polarized between glossy escapism and gritty despair. Songs of Forgotten Trees suggests another possibility: stories that are intimate, feminist, and politically awake, without losing their specificity.
More Than a First
To call Roy’s win historic is accurate, but it’s also limiting. Being “the first” is a headline; her deeper achievement is showing that Indian cinema can push past old templates and offer something both deeply local and universally resonant.
With Songs of Forgotten Trees, Anuparna Roy has not only entered the canon of global cinema—she has cracked open the frame through which Indian filmmakers are seen. Venice gave her the award. Roy gave us a reminder: there are stories still waiting to be told, and storytellers who will not compromise in telling them.
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