Anuparna Roy returns to Venice with Lovers in the Blue Night, set in Mumbai and centering on the lives of four migrants. The filmmaker discusses her perspective on desire, marginality, and belonging, while also confronting social inequality and displacement. A sensitive portrait of those facing the consequences of the climate crisis in Bangladesh, forced to leave their homeland behind.
One of the characters works producing rat poison. It is a very unusual detail. Where did the idea for this job come from? Is it something you encountered in real life, or does it also carry a particular meaning in the construction of the character and the world he inhabits?
The idea came from something I encountered in real life. In Mumbai, I saw a man doing this work in very wealthy housing societies: preparing poison and killing rats. It immediately stayed with me because it was such a strange and powerful contrast. You have these beautiful, protected buildings, and then there is someone who enters them to deal with everything the residents do not want to see – the dirt, the infestation, the death. His work is necessary, but the worker himself is almost invisible.
I became very curious about him and about the job. I wanted to understand what kind of person did this work, how he moved through those buildings and how the people living there looked at him – or perhaps did not look at him at all. That observation became part of Karim. I did not invent the occupation simply because it was unusual or cinematic. It belonged to the reality of the city I was looking at, and it helped me understand the position he occupies within that city.
Of course, once you place such a job inside a film, it begins to carry other meanings too. Karim handles poison and death as part of his daily routine, while serving people who live with far greater security and privilege than he does. He removes what they consider undesirable, but he is also someone whom society prefers not to acknowledge. As a migrant, as a poor man and as a closeted gay man, he is constantly being pushed towards invisibility. He has to perform one identity at home, another at work and another in his most intimate life.
I did not want the job to function as a heavy or obvious metaphor, because then Karim would stop being a person and become only a symbol. But the symbolism is naturally present. The city keeps itself clean and comfortable by asking certain people to handle what it rejects. Karim is one of those people. He is surrounded by poison, by secrecy and by the possibility of violence, yet he also carries tenderness and desire. That contradiction was very important to me.
As a child in her village in West Bengal, Anuparna Roy knew a woman named Ameena, who was forced to work to repay a debt and once confided that she never slept with her husband because he “didn’t take her with him.” Roy only understood the meaning of those words many yea...
Only a year ago you were here in Venice with Songs of Forgotten Trees, which won you the Best Director Award in Orizzonti. That film built a very intimate world around two women; Lovers in the Blue Night, instead, broadens its gaze to four lives crossing paths in Mumbai at night, amid desire, loneliness and marginality. What has changed in the way you tell stories from one film to the next, and what do you feel still deeply connects the two works?
A great deal changed in the process, because Songs of Forgotten Trees was made when I had almost no experience. I was learning while making it. The film was very instinctive and fragile, and much of it was contained inside an apartment and inside the relationship between two women. With Lovers in the Blue Night, I was more aware of the practical and professional side of filmmaking. We could cast the main actors on the basis of talent, rehearse more seriously and prepare the language work with a Sylheti coach. I had also learnt how much discipline and preparation are necessary to protect something that is emotionally delicate.
The new film is larger in structure. It moves through Mumbai at night, through different spaces, languages and social realities, and it follows four people rather than two. Their lives collide and separate; they misunderstand one another; they desire things that may be impossible. So the rhythm is more turbulent and the world is more crowded. I wanted to see whether I could hold several emotional journeys together without losing the intimacy that matters to me.
At the same time, I do not feel that I have moved away from the concerns of Songs of Forgotten Trees. Both films begin with people who have migrated and who are trying to create a place for themselves in a city that can make them feel anonymous. Both are about loneliness, intimacy, identity and belonging. They look at people whose feelings are rarely considered important, and at the small gestures through which they try to be seen. In that sense, the personal remains political in both films.
Songs of Forgotten Trees came very directly from a personal absence and from the memory of a relationship between two women. Lovers in the Blue Night opens that emotional world outwards. It brings in male desire, queer desire, marriage, work, theft, survival and the violence of class. But the connection is still the longing for another human being. I remain interested in what people cannot say, in the silences between them, and in how an image or a gesture can reveal more than an explanation. I also think the second film is less innocent, because I was less innocent as a filmmaker. After Venice, I understood the industry better and I had a clearer sense of responsibility. But I did not want that new awareness to make the film calculated. I wanted to remain open to accidents, to the actors and to the life of the city. The storytelling has expanded, but the emotional source is still very close to me.
Your characters search for affection and a sense of belonging precisely in situations where both would seem almost impossible: love appears to emerge where one would least expect it. Is this one possible key to the film? You have spoken about wanting to explore “the illusion of love”. What exactly do you mean by that? And how important is the boundary between genuine love, need and projection in the film?
Yes, that is one possible key to the film. These characters live in circumstances where affection, privacy and security are extremely difficult, and perhaps that is precisely why the desire to be loved becomes so strong. They are all searching for affirmation and for some meaning in their lives. They want someone to recognise them, to choose them or simply to tell them that they have a place in the world.
When I speak about the illusion of love, I do not mean that love is necessarily false. I mean the image of love that we create when we are lonely, displaced or desperate to belong. Sometimes we love a person; sometimes we love what we hope that person will give us. We may project freedom, rescue, acceptance or a new identity onto another human being. The feeling can be completely sincere, but the story we build around it may still be an illusion.
That is why the boundary between genuine love, need and projection is constantly shifting in the film. The characters are driven by desire, chaos, survival and their own personal choices. They can confuse love with sex, marriage, safety, validation or escape. Ameena and Karim are caught inside the social loop of marriage, even though the marriage cannot answer either of their desires. Other relationships appear to offer freedom, but they can create new loops and new forms of dependency. Nobody simply leaves one prison and enters a perfect space of liberation.
I did not want to stand outside the characters and decide which feeling is pure and which is not. Human beings are not so clear. A person can manipulate someone and still need tenderness. A relationship can begin through loneliness or self-interest and still contain a genuine moment of care. Someone can sincerely love another person while also using that love to hide from reality. For me, those contradictions are not mistakes in the characters; they are the characters.
The title also belongs to that emotional space. Night allows these people to imagine another version of themselves. The city becomes less fixed, and encounters that would be impossible in daylight can happen. But night is temporary. Morning returns, society returns and the identities they have to perform return. The blue night is therefore both a real space of intimacy and an illusion that cannot last forever.
I wanted the film to remain inside that ambiguity. Love can be an illusion and still be necessary. Need can become tenderness. Projection can reveal something true about what a person lacks. I am less interested in giving a final definition than in watching the characters move across that unstable boundary and seeing what they are willing to risk in order not to be alone.
In the film, floods and migration are not merely a backdrop: they enter into the characters’ stories and shape their relationship with Mumbai. How important was it for you to root these stories of love and desire in such a specific social reality? And how did you try to avoid defining the characters solely through their condition as migrants?
For me, floods and migration are not simply narrative elements or a backdrop. They are deeply political. I spent a long period – around a year, perhaps a year and a half – in the region of the Bay of Bengal, including Ghoramara. At first, I was there as an outsider, looking at and trying to capture the beauty of the place. But while I was doing that, I came to understand much more closely how climate displacement, border politics and the NRC had entered people’s lives.
I saw why people from Bangladesh might cross into India. It is not because they want to harm India or do something bad to the country. That is not their intention. Their intention is profoundly human: they are looking for a space in which they can survive. Floods have taken away their land and sometimes an entire village. They arrive on or pass through islands in the Bay of Bengal, hide, wait and try to continue living. They do not necessarily want anything from the government. Very often, all they are seeking is a very small piece of land, a small space where they can live peacefully with their families.
Seeing these lives closely gave me something I had wanted to write about for a long time. It also made me understand that migration cannot be separated from the question of who is forced to move, who is permitted to stay and why. Who is compelled to leave a country, a village or a city? Who has choices, and who does not? The answers are political, and they are not easy.
We often use the word migration only when somebody crosses a national border or travels overseas. But what about interstate migration within the same country? A Bengali person may have to leave Bengal for Delhi because there are no opportunities, because education is inadequate or because they do not feel safe. A person from Delhi may leave for entirely different reasons. These movements are happening constantly inside our own country, and they are also political. For me, migration has always carried that political weight, perhaps more than anything else. At the same time, I did not want the characters to exist only as examples of migration or poverty. That is something I had to learn. My mentors – Neeraj Sahai, Paresh Kamdar and Anirban Maity – repeatedly guided me towards a more neutral and humane perspective. By neutral, I do not mean emotionally indifferent. I mean trying not to look down at a character from a position of privilege and then congratulate myself for feeling sorry for them.
Earlier in my career, when I wrote about marginalised or less privileged people, I often approached them through sympathy. I thought sympathy was compassion. But when you bring that kind of sympathy into the writing, you can kill the soul of the character. The filmmaker remains above the person, seeing them only as poor, helpless or unfortunate. You do not allow them complexity, selfishness, humour, desire, cruelty, ambition or contradiction. You see the condition before you see the human being. What I had to learn was the language of empathy rather than sympathy. Empathy means allowing the characters to possess their own lives. They are migrants, but they are also lovers, workers, liars, dreamers and survivors. They make choices, including bad choices. They desire things that may be selfish or destructive. They are not present in the film so that a privileged audience can feel generous towards them. That is why I tried not to exaggerate their poverty or repeatedly underline that they are migrants. I did not want to sell poverty. Their circumstances are visible because those circumstances shape their possibilities, but the film must also contain their interior lives. The question is not only what has happened to them, but what they want, what they imagine and what they do to one another. I cannot say with certainty that we succeeded completely. As a filmmaker, I am still learning, and I am aware of my own position in society. But we tried our best to avoid turning poverty into spectacle or the migrant into a category. My mentors taught me a great deal about Third World cinema and about recognising the privilege from which one may be looking. When we forget that position, we easily end up sympathising with poor or marginalised characters instead of truly seeing them.
So the social reality had to be specific, because love and desire do not exist outside politics. The flood, the lost village, the border and the movement to Mumbai determine what the characters can do and how they understand belonging. But those realities are not the total definition of who they are. The film tries to hold both things together: the political forces that have displaced them and the most intimate, contradictory, human desires that remain entirely their own.
