When filmmaker Anuparna Roy was a child, she listened wide-eyed as her grandmother spoke dreamily of a river. Her maternal grandmother, married at nine to a man in his 30s in Purulia district of West Bengal, often told her stories about the river’s pure, beautiful water. “I always thought she must have seen this river, but after she died, I came to know that she actually never did. Only her dead body was taken to a riverbank,” says Roy, 31, on a Zoom call from Mumbai, two days after she returned – triumphant and tired – from the 82nd Venice Film Festival. There, she became the first Indian to win the Best Director Award in the Orizzonti (Horizons) section, joining a prestigious list of acclaimed auteurs.Those stories shaped Roy’s 2023 debut short film ‘Run to the River’, which is based on her grandmother’s life in British-era Bengal. “The protagonist is a Dalit girl married to a revolutionary freedom fighter. But even though he was fighting for his country’s freedom, he failed to provide freedom to his wife,” she says. This weaving of family memory with larger social and political contradictions defines Roy’s cinema. Her Venice win came with her debut feature ‘Songs of Forgotten Trees’ (SOFT), which follows two migrant women in Mumbai – a part-time sex worker and a call-center employee – who begin as strangers sharing a room, but slowly forge a quiet kinship.Born to a coal-sector worker and a homemaker, Roy is now celebrated as a grassroots-to-grandeur story, rising from a Purulia village to an internationally recognised filmmaker. Without film school training, she juggled IT and call centre jobs to fund her films. Yet she is wary of the “struggle” narrative. “I was doing jobs to support myself and my family. To talk about liberation in my films, I first had to liberate myself economically,” she says. Her remote IT job even helped during the shoot of SOFT: “It was work from home. I would log in and then go off to shoot. I even received a message from my ex-manager saying he was proud of me. It was generous of him not to mention the kind of activities I used to do while ‘working.’ I was pathetic at that job!” she laughs.Roy’s work is driven by memories of survival and discrimination in rural India. Her latest film references a childhood friend, Jhuma Nath, whom her father forbade her to meet because she was Dalit. Married at 13, Jhuma left a deep impression on Roy. Other moments of gender bias also stayed with her – from girls being given rice in school when boys got books, to being told to cover her nose while passing a tribal village. Her grandmother’s story also inspired the female kinship angle in SOFT. “My grandmother, when she entered her marital home at nine, had a stepdaughter of the same age. The two bonded well, and after my grandfather died, these two women ran the family together. One earned, the other cooked and cared for four daughters. I began to imagine why they couldn’t also fall in love with each other. That idea became the foundation of the film,” Roy explains.Literature was her early training ground: James Joyce and Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay influenced her while she studied English (Hons) in Asansol. Her 21-year-old cousin Adrija, who took up the same subject because of her ‘dear didi’ recalls, “She struggled so much, sold her belongings, exhausted all her energy and money. She even sold her TV while making her short film.” Producer Bibhanshu Rai describes her as “stubborn and persistent,” crediting her resourcefulness in bringing SOFT to completion.Roy is part of the new wave of Indian cinema centering women’s agency and sisterhood, alongside names like Payal Kapadia. “My next project will return to my grandmother’s story, where the freedom struggle plays out alongside the bond between my grandmother and her stepdaughter,” she says.As for advice to young, independent filmmakers from small towns, she offers a note of encouragement: “Those who are writing a script and are not able to finish it, or not able to find a producer, they are already filmmakers for me. They’re trying to make something, and I know they will because they’ll always find a way.” Go to Source
