Indian director Anuparna Roy returns to the Venice Film Festival's Horizons competition with "Lovers in the Blue Night," a year after becoming the first Indian filmmaker to win the section's best director prize for her debut, "Songs of Forgotten Trees." The new film, sold internationally by Parallax, follows four migrants navigating desire and belonging in Mumbai, and is rooted in a story Roy has carried since childhood about a bonded labourer from her hometown.

The film centres on Ameena, whose closeted gay husband Karim and his lover Sukka, a man contending with caste barriers, sit at the heart of the narrative; Roy said she wanted a neutral, empathetic register for both men rather than exaggerating their hardship or reducing it to ideology. She describes love as a form of resistance for characters who are punished for wanting things, and points to Karim's job killing rats in wealthy housing societies, followed by him going home to kiss another man, as an image she calls "no less than revolutionary." Like her debut, the film draws on floods Roy experienced growing up near the Bangladesh border, with displaced characters again exiled from a destroyed home, though this time the focus shifts from two women to two men exploring bisexuality.