In Indian cinema, women have long been denied the role of true protagonists. Too often, they are framed as satellites orbiting male narratives, often instrumentalised rather than fully realised characters. Screened in the Orizzonti section at the Venice Film Festival, Songs of Forgotten Trees, directed by Anuparna Roy, challenges that legacy by placing women at the center, as they truly are.

The film follows the life of Thooya (Naaz Shaikh), a migrant and aspiring actress maneuvering through Mumbai. Her survival is strategic and precarious, depicting the subtlety of compromises many make in the pursuit of dreams. Thooya’s character is potrayed with empathy and complexity; she is neither a victim nor a moral archetype, but a living, breathing person shaped by circumstance and desire. Through her journey, the film subtly interrogates the cost of ambition and the ways in which marginalised women move tough spaces that are rarely designed to accommodate them.

Into Thooya’s world enters Swetha (Sumi Baghel), a fellow migrant whose corporate career conceals its own suffocating compromises. Sharing an upscale apartment, the two women form an unspoken bond. As past wounds and hidden desires come to light, the narrative develops with tenderness, giving the audience space to contemplate in its moments of intimacy. The film shows that survival is never simple, that relationships are complicated, and that strength often lives side by side with longing and doubt.

Mumbai itself becomes a relentless presence, seductive in its promises, brutal in its indifference. Within its chaos, Roy finds a language of intimacy. She stages her characters in small rooms and transient spaces, never allowing the city to overwhelm but always letting it press against them. The sound design hums with intensity, while the camera rests on gestures of care and fatigue. By refusing to aestheticise misery, so often a trap in social realist cinema, the film becomes even more gripping.

Roy’s own history informs this work. Growing up in a system where “girls were rationed rice by body weight” and where state schemes reduced futures to marriage subsidies, she knows how early women’s lives are dictated. Songs of Forgotten Trees is somewhat personal and political, I may say, a response to memories of erased girls and muted voices, a resistance to the ways cinema has historically portrayed women as ornamental.

What Roy offers is rare in Indian cinema: women as they are, not as they are imagined by others. They are contradictory, wounded, unheroic, but wholly alive. At a time when female characters are still too often sidelined, Songs of Forgotten Trees insists that their stories are worthy of cinematic centrality.

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Written by Maggie Gogler

Featured image courtesy of the Venice Film Festival

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