At the 82nd Venice Film Festival, Anuparna Roy’s Songs of Forgotten Trees was a rare kind of debut, one that challanges the ways Indian cinema has historically positioned women: not as symbols or accessories to a male narrative, but as living, breathing individuals. Her film places women firmly at the centre and lets them be contradictory, unheroic, fragile, and string all at once. When I asked her about this choice, she was clear. “Making a women-centric film has been my choice since I understood our position in society as a second sex, as we are socially and culturally constructed as Other. It automatically generates and brings a responsibility in the plate as a women filmmaker. Ultimately, it’s about respect. Respecting complexity, individuality, and the real-life diversity of women’s experiences. Fully realized characters resonate more deeply, not because they’re perfect, but because they’re true.”

Respect and depth come to life most clearly in Thooya, a young woman moving through Mumbai with balancing survival with a pursuit of her dreams. Roy collaborated with Naaz Shaikh to created the character, and their shared history brought something authentic on screen. “Naaz and me are close friends, I know her from the past six years and it feels great after she gave an audition for the same – it was brilliant, innocent and original. She brought a lot to the table- the song in our film belongs to her late mother which gave me another perspective about memory, and memory was one of the main elements inside the film. She was vulnerable enough to share every perspective she has had.”

That vulnerability becomes part of the story as does her friendship with Swetha, a corporate worker whose compromises are etched into her silences. The bond between them is not built on overt declarations but on gestures and small intimacies, something Roy draws directly from life. “I have seen such intimacy over the period in my own grandmother’s house where there were no male, my grandfather died and she had a platonic relationship with her stepdaughter who was at the same age of her. She was a widow too. Both child brides bonded well inside the house, took responsibility, sat beside each other, shared the same house, the expenses, the house chores. Isn’t it romantic? Very much. So the inspiration came from such encounter of silent love and mutual respect.”

The setting of the film is no less important. Mumbai appears in fragments, not as a glamorous cityscape but as a relentless, seductive, indifferent force. Roy insists she never set out to explore the city directly. “I hardly had any plan to explore the city, rather I had plan to explore the crumble apartment inside the city. But elements of Mumbai are unavoidable and it came very naturally without even a plan. The physical and material reality of the life of my characters was very important. So, we chose this small and cramped apartment.” Within these walls, between peeling plaster and muted light, the story finds its beating heart.

Roy grew up, as she recalls, in a system where girls’ lives were rationed, measured, and constrained, and that history surfaces throughout the film. “In the film, personal histories of erasure and restrictions emerged not as overt statements but as textures, fragmented visuals, interrupted soundscape and landscape heavy with silence. These elements reflect a lineage memory that has been obscured, inherited in fragments through matrilineal stories, lost languages and emotional absence. I was deeply conscious of how these suppressed histories could be transformed into a quiet form of resistance, not through didactic messaging but through presence, atmosphere and what is deliberately left unsaid.” In her hands, memory becomes resistance, and silence becomes a way of speaking.

At Venice, Roy hoped that her women would be understood not as curiosities or political tokens, but as people in their own right. “I hoped global audiences would see the women in the film not as cultural or political symbols, but as complex individuals – contradictory, tender, flawed, and fully human – whose inner lives resist simplification,” she explained.

She also reflected on how differently the film might be received at home. “While viewers in India might read their stories through the lens of shared cultural memory or specific socio-political contexts, I wanted international audiences to encounter them without exoticism, to recognize the universality in their silence, their defiance, and their quiet negotiations with power. The aim was not to explain these women, but to invite a deeper listening to their emotional truths, their contradictions, and their right to remain unknowable.”

Songs of Forgotten Trees tells the story of two migrant women, Thooya and Swetha, who find themselves unexpectedly sharing an apartment in Mumbai. Their lives, shaped by precarious work and memories of loss, gradually intertwine through small gestures of solidarity and care. Roy does not offer them easy victories or grand statements; instead, she allows them to exist with all their contradictions, their fractured intimacies, and their persistence. Critics praised the film for precisely this refusal to simplify. It was hailed as a work that placed women not at the margins, but at the centre -unheroic, flawed, but wholly alive. Anurag Kashyap, who presented the film, called Roy “the next strong voice of a filmmaker from India,” marvelling that he himself “couldn’t have done [a film like this] even 25 years ago.” International distributors agreed, with French company Celluloid Dreams acquiring the film for worldwide release.

What Roy achieves in her first feature is remarkable not because it shouts, but because it listens. Her cinema is not one of spectacle but of recognition – recognition of erased histories, of the intimacies women build in silence, of the weight of survival carried lightly, sometimes invisibly. Songs of Forgotten Trees is a story about two women, a testimony to generations whose lives were rationed and restricted, and to the possibility of finding strenght in the quietest of gestures. It is a film that asks us not to decode or define its women, but simply to sit with them, to witness, and to remember.

Written and interviewed by Maggie Gogler

Featued image coutesy of Anuparna Roy

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