Cannes 2024: Anasuya Sengupta becomes first Indian to win Best Actress Award
Sengupta won the award for her gritty role in Bulgarian director Constantin Bojanov's first Hindi film, The Shameless, about a forbidden relationship between a sex worker and a young girl
Anasuya Sengupta became the first Indian to bag the top acting award at the Cannes Film Festival on Friday night. The Kolkata-born and Goa-based debutante actress won the Best Actress Award for her gritty role in Bulgarian director Constantin Bojanov’s film, The Shameless, which was screened in the Un Certain Regard segment of the festival. The director and the two lead actresses, Anasuya Sengupta and Omara Shetty, were present at the film’s premiere at Salle Debussy on Friday morning.
Receiving the award, Anasuya, who was overwhelmed with emotion, dedicated it to “the queer community and other marginalised communities for bravely fighting a fight they really shouldn’t have to.” She ended her short acceptance speech, amid cheers and applause, by saying, “We don’t need to be colonised to know how very, very pathetic colonisers are.”
The Shameless centres around the illicit love affair between a vagabond (Sengupta) seeking refuge in a northern Indian community of sex workers after she flees from Delhi on being charged with murder, and a teenager named Devika (Shetty) who is initially sheltered from entering sex work because of her physical ailments, only to be thrown into its murky and messy world. It portrays a dark, disturbing world of exploitation of two sex workers — while one bears the indelible scars of her line of work, the other forges a bond and seeks to throw off their shackles days away from her ritual initiation into the flesh trade. The film, which also features Mita Vashisht, Tanmay Dhanania, Rohit Kokate, Anasuya Sengupta and Auroshikha Dey in key roles, was shot over a month and half in India and Nepal.
‘Abstractions of reality’ in The Shameless
Sengupta, who studied at La Martinière in Kolkata and went on to major in English literature from Jadavpur University, has worked mainly as a production designer in Mumbai, notably in Srijit Mukherjee’s ‘Forget Me Not,’ an episode in in Netflix’s Satyajit Ray anthology (2021), which tells the story of a cut-throat corporate shark, who prides himself on his vivid memory until an encounter with a woman he can’t recall sends him down a vortex of self-doubt. She also contributed to the set design of the Netflix show Masaba Masaba.
Anasuya Sengupta and Omara Shetty in The Shameless
The Shameless was one of the films representing India at the 77th Cannes Film Festival, which gets over today (May 25). At the premiere, the festival’s deputy artistic director, Christian Jeune, said while introducing the title: “India has a very strong presence here this year. It includes this film by a Bulgarian director.” Bojanov said: “This has been a long journey. It was nothing like (Francis Ford) Coppola’s, but it was 12 years.” He was referring to Coppola’s Megalopolis, which also premiered at Cannes and has been decades in the making. The making of The Shameless, said Bojanov, was interrupted several times due to the Covid pandemic. The production also took its time because “financing it took forever.”
Bojanov, who has made countless trips to India over the last two decades, tells a universal story that is specifically Indian. “I did not intend The Shameless to be a social document. I went in for abstractions of reality in piecing together the story,” he told reporters ahead of the film’s world premiere.