New Delhi, Sept. 13 -- Anuparna Roy's 'Lovers in the Blue Night' won the NETPAC Award for 'Best Asian Film' at the 83rd Venice International Film Festival, where the film competed in the 'Orizzonti' section. The award marks another significant milestone in Anuparna's rapidly emerging international career. The filmmaker made her Venice debut in 2025 with her first feature, 'Songs of Forgotten Trees', for which she won the Orizzonti Award for 'Best Director'. With 'Lovers in the Blue Night', Roy returns to Venice a year later and leaves with her second award at the festival.
The NETPAC jury recognised the film for its sensitive portrayal of marginalised lives in Mumbai, describing it as a 'delicately sensitive vision of the intersecting lives of migrant workers' and praising Roy's 'confident voice' and the film's 'cohesively nuanced' exploration of displacement, urban survival, hidden desire, gender, poverty and class. The film is in Hindi, Sylheti Bengali and Marathi.
Set against Mumbai's restless underbelly, 'Lovers in the Blue Night' brings together four lives shaped by migration, loneliness and survival - a closeted husband and his unhappy wife who works in a bar, a lonely man involved in sex work and a petty criminal navigating fleeting desire. Their lives intersect to form an intimate portrait of people living on the margins of a city that never quite allows them to belong.
"Winning the NETPAC Award means a lot to me because this film comes from a very personal place. These are characters and lives that are often pushed to the margins or looked at without really being seen. I wanted to approach them with tenderness, dignity and honesty. To receive this recognition at Venice, a year after my debut was awarded here, is deeply moving. I'm grateful that the film has found space with the audience and jury," said Anuparna, the girl from Bengal's Purulia.
Published by HT Digital Content Services with permission from Millennium Post.