Venice Film Festival winning film garners UK release from New Wave Films.
Directed by Anuparna Roy, this film won her a Best Director Award in the Horizons section at the Venice Film Festival. It screened at the London Film Festival 2025 where it was nominated for the Sutherland Award.
Thooya (Naaz Shaikh), a migrant and aspiring actress, spends her days moonlighting as a sex worker in her apartment, shedding her inhibitions in acting class. New to Mumbai, Thooya rents out her spare room to the quiet Shweta (Sumi Baghel), who works in a call centre and is also new to Mumbai.
The two women soon start to build a connection, one in which they rely on each other, building their own cocoon far away from the noise and challenges of the oppressive city. But as the realities of how they live their lives begin to clash, their fragile bond is tested.
Essentially, a two hander for the majority of the film; this film is keen to show the kinship of the tandem as they seek to climb the social ladder. Throughout the film there is this underlying threat of masculinity; the male landlord who asks why men are coming in and out of the house regularly; the male suitor, Nitin, who brandishes Thooya a whore and nothing more, one without standing in their world.
Shewta wants to climb the ladder and to do so she has to use English for phone calls. It is fascinating when she interacts with people who are so against the old national language. When we first encounter her on a customer service call she reiterates, “Please sir, I cannot do this call in Hindi”, she relents and completes the call for the customer. This is mirrored by a later exchange between Thooya and a male suitor who tells Thooya, ‘And don’t show off with your English”. The function to speak for themselves is being challenged by males attempting dominance over them.
This has long been a trait of Indian culture, and in recent years there have been films seeking to show a greater expansion of women’s roles in Indian films. From Sister Midnight‘s tale of a woman in an arranged marriage with a dullard and the use of fantasy elements to express her creative identity showing woman with social aspirations above mopping floors.
This film is more in line with Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine As Light which garnered great acclaim at Cannes in 2024; again this showed women at the forefront with men seeking to find disrupt their quest for solace.
Roy uses the restriction of the flat as a sort of prison; there are numerous shots of the women looking out from the balcony over the cityscape. We hear the sounds while they see the sights; the camera pulls back to show they are just one story (perhaps there are more like them) but this is the only one of note. Internally, the same view out of the window is sometimes obscured by washing lines as they hang their washing – again their domesticity is shielding them from the larger world.
The use of trees or nature as a means for the pair to harken back to simpler times is a yearning familiar to many city dwellers, who have forsaken more hours in the day for the hum of the metropolis. The concluding shot and frames of the pair in nature is a message of togetherness and connecting through the natural landscape and how that solace can be achieved if a problem is halved.
Songs of Forgotten Trees is a bold and frank depiction of women in the third world country and the struggles they face and have to overcome to merely make a mark and maintain employment. Helped by two sterling performances by Shaikh and Baghel, this is a film that despite the short runtime will stay with you long after the fact.
My thanks to New Wave Films for the review opportunity.
Songs of Forgotten Trees releases in UK cinemas on August 14.
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