Anurag Kashyap Backs Anuparna Roy's Venice-Bound Debut Songs of Forgotten Trees

In the ever-throbbing heart of Mumbai, where dreams and survival blur into one, a new story emerges — tender, raw, and fiercely alive. ‘Songs of Forgotten Trees,’ the debut feature from director Anuparna Roy, has been backed by none other than cult auteur Anurag Kashyap to premiere at Venice’s prestigious Horizons strand, marking it as India’s sole representative on the global stage this year.

This is not your typical Bollywood fare. Instead, it’s a piercing, intimate look into the lives of two migrant women navigating the city’s relentless pulse, trading beauty, wit, and silent empathy as currency.

A still from Songs of Forgotten TreesIMDb

Through this lens, the film unspools a narrative that is as much about selfhood as it is about unexpected kinship rooted in the gritty realities of Mumbai yet universal in its emotional reach.

Set to premiere at the 82nd Venice Film Festival that starts on August 27 running until September 9, Anurparna Roy's film is the only Indian film selected this year and will be presented by Kashyap whose Bandar starring Bobby Deol and Sanya Malhotra is set for a premiere at Tiff 2025.

The film posits a simple question that binds through the story: what happens when two migrant women, bound by survival rather than sentiment, share a space in a city that never stops taking?

Songs of Forgotten Trees follows Thooya (Naaz Shaikh), an aspiring actress surviving Mumbai’s hard edge with beauty and barter. When she sublets her sugar daddy’s upscale apartment to Swetha (Sumi Baghel), a cautious corporate professional from a similar migrant background, the two women begin orbiting each other. What begins as mutual disinterest morphs into a strange and fragile intimacy which is built on silences, on wounds revealed only through proximity.

Instead of falling for the usual trope of representing Mumbai as the glitzy Bollywood city of rooftop bars and train-station dance numbers, in the film it’s an organism. A hungry, humming machine of dreams deferred and dignity bartered. Roy renders the city with tenderness, but also fearlessness as she doesn’t look away.

India’s only selection in Venice’s Horizons strand this year is joining the ranks of previous films including Chaitanya Tamhane’s “Court” and Karan Tejpal’s “Stolen,” the premiered on Prime Video last month.

Moreover, Roy’s film premieres in what is shaping up to be one of the most high-powered Venice lineups in years. The 82nd edition opens on 27 August 2025 with Paolo Sorrentino’s La Grazia, and includes new works from Guillermo del Toro (Frankenstein), Yorgos Lanthimos (Bugonia), Noah Baumbach (Jay Kelly), and Kathryn Bigelow (A House of Dynamite).

Jim Jarmusch returns with Father Mother Sister Brother, a black-and-white family saga starring Adam Driver and Cate Blanchett. Benny Safdie’s The Smashing Machine, with Dwayne Johnson playing a washed-up MMA fighter, is already attracting Oscar whisperings. And Luca Guadagnino, always at home on the Lido, will debut his Julia Roberts-led #MeToo legal thriller After the Hunt.

“I have always believed in backing new talent, especially those who want to say something different, challenge the set norms by their ideas and beliefs,” Kashyap said in a statement. “Ranjan and I have been associated with multiple such films over the years, and it’s amazing to see such raw talent continuously coming up. Anuparna is definitely one such voice and we feel proud and happy to back her first feature.”

Director Anuparna Roy reportedly self-funded much of the project while juggling three corporate jobs in Mumbai, often working nights to shape a script no one else was asking for. She told Variety she’s drawn to stories mainstream cinema “continues to ignore.

“Despite having one of the largest film industries in the world by volume, we rarely tell stories of the marginalized – of those excluded by class, caste, and gender,” she said. “I want to change that. I want to speak of the miseries I’ve witnessed and lived through, not just as an Indian but as a global citizen. I believe that telling these stories might give voice to the unheard, offer solace to some, and perhaps even inspire others.”

The project carries deeply personal resonance for Roy, whose search for her childhood friend Jhuma Nath who was married off young under what she describes as “a man-made social order and a failed government scheme” — was the seed for the story.

“This film carries her memories,” Roy says. Songs of Forgotten Trees is not just a work of fiction, but an elegy for the lives interrupted, for the voices that never made it to the screen, and for the quiet resilience of women who survive not for applause, but because they must.