Continuing her dream run with the Venice Film Festival, filmmaker Anuparna Roy has scored a huge win at the fest’s latest edition with her film Lovers in the Blue Night, taking home the NETPAC Award for Best Asian Film. This comes a year after her debut feature, Songs of Forgotten Trees, won her the Best Director award at the 2025 edition of the coveted festival.
Set in Mumbai, 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 desires. The multi-lingual film is shot in Hindi, Sylheti Bengali and Marathi.
The announcement stated that 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.
Roy in an official statement expressed her joy over the honour, while noting that through the film, she wanted to shed light on the lives of the marginalised and lend them the deserved dignity and gentleness.
“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 a space with the audience and jury,” she said.
The film is produced by Khan and Kumar Media, with Vikas Kumar, Sharib Khan, Bibhanshu Rai, Romil Modi and Rhet Topham as producers. Neeraj Churi and Beesham A Seecharan serves as Executive Producer and Navin Shetty as co-producers.
“An award like this is deeply meaningful because it recognises not just a film, but the sensitivity, courage, and conviction with which it has been made. Lovers in the Blue Night asks us to look closely at lives that are often pushed to the margins, and to recognise the humanity, desire, and dignity within them. Anuparna Roy has made a film of remarkable emotional and cinematic confidence, and it has been a privilege for us at Khan & Kumar Media to support her vision,” Kumar stated.
