Annie's song: Anuparna Roy's rebellious road to Songs of Forgotten Trees

At school, she recalls the focus was on girls' bodies and betrothal more than their brains: They were given rice to maintain optimal weight, while boys received books and toys

Anuparna Roy did not want to make one of those festival movies where Mumbai becomes a character. So the director avoided scenes in local trains or by the seaside, had the two female leads of Songs of Forgotten Trees move into her own rental home, and filmed them interacting mainly within its confines. A trademark Mumbai moment did, however, occur during the shoot: The owner of the apartment evicted her. When the film went on to win Roy an Orizzonti award for Best Director at the Venice Film Festival in early September last year, the same landlady returned with congratulations. “She had thrown me out for shooting there without her knowing, but texted so nicely afterwards,” Roy grins.

 

The episode demonstrates two things about the filmmaker: She is used to breaking the rules, and she often gets her way.  

 

When I arrive for our lunch at Sorozai, a cheerful Goan-themed restaurant, Roy is already there. This is one of her favourite spots in Versova, a part of town where many of the city’s cinema folk live. The director, known as “Annie” to her friends, appears relaxed but somewhat tired slouched against the sofa. She has been in the thick of apartment hunting, all over again, and apologetically disappears into texts and a call with the broker before we start talking.

 

Our meeting takes place after her return from Italy. Despite the prestigious win, the first such for an Indian filmmaker, she was received coldly by a few sections. In her acceptance speech, she had declared solidarity with Palestine, adding that that “might upset my country”. As her film’s backer Anurag Kashyap had foreseen, speaking her mind thus earned backlash from nationalist commentators.

 

But disobedience is by now a discipline for Roy. Consider some facts of her career so far: She is two films and 31 years old, hails from a conservative village in West Bengal’s Purulia district, has never formally trained in cinema, and secretly juggled three IT jobs until she had Rs 15 lakh to self-fund her maiden short. “I have upset male members on both sides of the family,” she shrugs. “Knowing yourself is the biggest asset as a woman filmmaker. You have to be rebellious.”

 

Roy’s emphasis on telling stories of marginalisation, what she describes as “third-world cinema” imbued with a “female gaze”, convinced the likes of Udta Punjab producer Ranjan Singh to back her second film — where two migrant women (played by Naaz Shaikh and Sumi Baghel) from different backgrounds and values end up flatmates in the big city. The intimacy they come to share is closer to romantic love than sisterhood, says Roy. These third-world movies have quickly made waves in the first and second worlds: Her short Run to the River debuted at Russia’s intimate Cheboksary International Film Festival, and Songs of Forgotten Trees is being sold internationally by France’s Celluloid Dreams.

 

As we place our orders, too, the director is at odds with convention. The restaurant is named after a famous Konkani nudge meaning “Do you want a drink?”, and Frank Sinatra is crooning, on heaven-sent cue, “If you can use some exotic booze, there’s a bar in far Bombay”, but Roy is content with tomato soup. I keep her sober company with a virgin hot toddy. The Bengali filmmaker stays put in the vegetarian section of the menu, asking for paneer in green curry. But this is no rebellion. She is off meat temporarily for health reasons.

 

Over the 45-day shoot of her award-winning film, however, the independent filmmaker laboured over pots of mutton and chicken curry, fish in posto (poppy seeds), and dal chawal for the cast and crew. Both as a way to ensure they ate home food, and to bond with the team. “I used to eat everything back then,” she says, a touch nostalgic as I heap orange ladlefuls of surmai (king mackerel), in piquant Goan coconut sauce, onto my plate of steamed rice.

 

For someone who doesn’t come from wealth, it is rare to make it this far in the low-paying world of independent cinema. But money is an obstacle that resides only in the mind, says Roy, who studied English literature and mass communication before turning to films. “If I have a camera, I can make a film. Funds are secondary, story is primary.” She plucks out stories and characters from the worlds she has personally inhabited, seeing “no point in talking about something you have never experienced”.

 

Growing up in rural Narayanpur, in “a middle-class family that did not allow their women to go to the roof and watch the sunset”, Roy realised she had to get out. Her worldview developed in adulthood once practices she had accepted at face value began to strike her as curious, even ominous. At school, she recalls the focus had been on girls’ bodies and betrothal more than their brains: They were given rice to maintain optimal weight, while boys received books and toys. At home, Roy’s father disapproved of her childhood bestie because of her surname — in other words, her Dalit caste.

 

The pain of abandoning that friendship intensified when the friend in question, Jhuma, abruptly left school; Roy later deduced she was married off by her parents who availed of a government cash-transfer scheme, which, instead of keeping girls in school, was promoting early marriage. Through such memories, the personal revealed itself to be political. “I found a similarity between my father and the government,” she says. “That gave me the idea of how man-made societies and hierarchies are, how they work. With every initiative, they make us feel less than, like the second sex.”

 

There were life-affirming memories, too. The air turns festive, as the restaurant playlist switches to Remo Fernandes’ Maria Pitache, and as Roy recounts many afternoons spent watching commercial movies with one of her aunts and predicting plot points before they happened. She also describes the bond her grandmother, who had been a child bride, shared with her same-age step-daughter. That bond had deepened after Roy’s grandfather died, as the two women raised four young girls together. “I saw that and wondered — why can’t they be a couple? Why do they need a male?”

 

Those questions followed her to New Delhi, where she moved for graduate studies. Roy was not there to study film, but her close friends at the university were. Observing as they made their degree movies encouraged her to dream up her own scripts. She turned the questions into stories for both her short film, where a child bride in British Bengal longs to see the river with her friend, and her full-length feature, where two women co-habit “surrounded only by each other”.

 

A team, Roy adds, is the other primary need for an independent filmmaker. Many of Roy’s university friends, including producer Bibhanshu Rai and cinematographer Debjit Samanta, have remained collaborators. When there were budget crunches, experienced film editors Anirban Maity and Prakash Kamdar decided to support her projects at little to no cost. Remote call centre jobs selling hardware and software, and stints as a “terrible assistant director” for ad films helped save up to manage other gaps in the budget.

 

Each film is an attempt to fix the flaws of the previous one, says the director. As a writer, she finds herself more concerned with images and metaphors than dialogue. “That is a problem I have, a good problem.” Not all of these metaphors register with the viewer, she has learnt, but instead of explaining things herself, she now lives in the hope that they will be spotted. Between the first and second film, she also understood the importance of spending more time with the lead cast, inviting them to live with her for two months of pre-production workshop. Like several independent filmmakers, Roy developed idiosyncrasies of form, too — she is against the old-school mid, wide and close-up shots, and prefers to have long takes of her characters and their material reality “from as far as possible and sometimes as close as possible”.

 

Songs of Forgotten Trees – a film “beyond borders, culture, and language” – has since been screened at film festivals in India, though initially she wasn’t sure “if it will get a place in its own nation”. Eager to continue making people uncomfortable with her work, the wunderkind of Venice will start shooting her next project in Mumbai this year. She has a story already, a fast-paced one where the characters are always running. She has a new camera too, a gift from Anurag Kashyap. That is all Roy needs to make a film.