Director Anuparna Roy Cut a Gujarat Riots Backstory After Threats

Anuparna Roy says she removed a character's Gujarat riots backstory from Lovers in the Blue Night because her life was under threat. "I had been threatened. My life was under threat," the director told The Film Stage in an interview published around the film's screening at the 2026 Busan International Film Festival.

Roy's debut feature, Songs of Forgotten Trees (2025), won her Best Director in the Orizzonti section of the Venice Film Festival. A year later she returned to Venice with Lovers in the Blue Night, a drama of Bengali immigrants surviving in a harsh Mumbai, shot largely on location in real slum areas near the city's beaches.

What was cut, and why?

The character Omi, played by Jatin Sarin, was originally a survivor of the 2002 Gujarat riots. In Roy's backstory, Omran and his mother fled Gujarat after his elder sister was raped and murdered by political goons while buying mutton for dinner. "When his mother found her dead body, it had been chopped into pieces like mutton," Roy said. In Bombay, the mother now buys mutton, cooks it and throws it out — a portrait of food trauma Roy says is "never discussed."

She kept the scenes. "We'll turn them into a short once the government's gone," she said. Asked why she cut them, she was blunt: "because they'd do the same thing to me. I want to live."

Roy says she already feels unsafe. After she spoke about Palestine at Venice, "the government didn't like it. They tweeted about it, and then deleted the tweet." She shows no appetite for retreat: "Every time they give me a mic, I'll talk about miseries and uncomfortable topics."

How was the film actually made?

The production ran on three months of pre-production and 45 days of shooting, on top of three years of writing that began before the Venice win. Producers Vikas Kumar and Sharif Khan, the latter from the U.S., signed Roy before Venice. "They took the risk without ever knowing if the film would come out," she said.

The film uses several regional languages deliberately: Jalkau Marathi, Sylheti Bengali — which Roy says is "getting wiped out by the so-called elite Bengali languages" — some Gujarati, and Hindi used "in a very subtle way." Her point is political. "India is a country whose borders were created by Europeans," she said. "If you go 30 kilometers in any direction, you will find a different language, a different culture."

Casting leaned on friendships. Pritam Pilania (Karim) and Jatin Sarin are friends; Bhushan Shimpi (Sukka) worked with her on Songs of Forgotten Trees. Neelima Sharma won the role of Ameena through an audition — Roy wanted someone pretty because "beauty shall come with destruction."

Does censorship worry her?

The film deals openly with homosexuality, and Roy acknowledges "of course there is censorship pressure." Her defense is spare: "in my films you will find only bonding and love and friendship. I'm pretty sure bonding, love, and friendship will not harm society."

The bar that doubles as a phone-sex call center is invented, she concedes, though such call centers exist to keep clients on the line and inflate bills. The overhead single take revealing room after room came from a practical shortage of screen time. Cinematographer Debjit Samanta, a collaborator since her debut, worked with heavy improvisation — including a long-lens beach shot where Karim cannot enter the water because of his past.

Roy cites Robert Bresson's Notes on the Cinematographer, Alfonso Cuarón and Joachim Trier as craft influences, and names Rima Das, Nandita Das, Mira Nair, Zoya Akhtar, Vishal Bhardwaj, Rohan Kanawade and Tribeny Rai as Indian filmmakers she admires.

What does this change for her career? Her next film, she says, is romantic — "it comes with ethnic cleansing, beauty through destruction." The Omi footage waits in the can.