We woke up to the news that Anasuya Sengupta, who grew up in Kolkata has become the first Indian to win the Cannes Best Actor award in the Un Certain Regard section. She won it for The Shameless, directed by the Bulgarian-American filmmaker Konstantin Bojanov.
Kolkata claimed her daughter and rose to the occasion to hug her in Social Media. Anasuya Sengupta, who is making headlines for becoming the first Indian actor to win the Best Actress at Cannes, never wanted to become an actor in the first place. Sengupta, who hails from Kolkata, holds a degree in English literature from Jadavpur University and wanted to discover herself through journalism. However, life had other plans.
Anasuya, who starred in a supporting role for Anjan Dutta’s 2009 film Madly Bangalee, dabbled in theatre for some time before shifting to Mumbai in 2013. There, she started working as a production designer. As a production designer in Mumbai, the projects she handled include Sanjeev Sharma’s Saat Uchakkey (2016), starring the likes of Manoj Bajpayee and Anupam Kher, and Srijit Mukherji’s Forget Me Not, starring Ali Fazal as part of the Netflix anthalogy Ray (2021). Anasuya has also lent her expertise to the visual panorama of Netflix’s Masaba Masaba.
Although it seemed like all was going well for Anasuya, there was a time when she felt lost and claustrophobic. This made her take a leap of faith and shift to Goa with support from her father. Here, she met the love of her life Yashdeep.
It is in facebook that Anasuya befriended the American-Bulgarian Film Director Konstantin Bojanov requested her to audition for a role for the film The Shamelss. When Anasuya sent across her audition tape, it was a yes at first shot.
The genesis of The Shameless was serendipitous. The Director, Bojanov stumbled upon William Dalrymple's Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India in a Brooklyn bookstore that he frequented near his house in New York. The book gave him the idea of making a documentary cross-referencing four of the stories through characters with similar backgrounds and predicaments and examining larger themes of love, sexuality, art and freedom of expression within a society in which the caste system is still very powerful.
In the dead of night, Renuka escapes from a Delhi brothel after stabbing a policeman to death. She changes her name from Nadira to Renuka and seeks refuge in an insular northern Indian community of sex workers, where she forges a forbidden relationship with teenage prostitute Devika. The younger girl stands up against an entrenched system and an oppressive mother and joins the fugitive on a hazardous dash towards freedom in the face of a spiral of violence. Renuka is played by Anasuya Sengupta.
The Shameless was more than a decade in the making. Due to limitations of budget and multiple postponements caused by the pandemic, the shooting time was long. Once the shoot got underway, the film began demanding its own visual interpretation.
The Shameless, other than, Anasuya Sengupta, features Mita Vashisht, Tanmay Dhanania, Omara Shetty and Rohit Kokate in key roles.
An introduction to the less known Director. Konstantin Bojanov graduated from the National School of Fine Arts in Sofia and then continued his studies at the Royal College of Art in London before going to New York University to study documentary filmmaking. He first came to India 20 years ago as a tourist when he started thinking about a film based in India.
His filmmaking career began with Lemon is Lemon (2001), a documentary about a group of heroin addicts who lay bare their emotions on camera. He followed that up with another documentary, Invisible (2005), about six young addicts in Sofia. Bojanov's narrative feature debut, Ave (2011) was a coming-of-age story of a boy and a girl who meet on the road and the latter invents new identities for the two with each ride that they hitch. The film premiered in Cannes Critics Week. His second film, Light Thereafter (2018), about an emotionally fragile and artistically inclined Bulgarian-British teenager (played by Barry Keoghan) who travels across Europe to meet a French painter he idolizes, competed for the Hivos Tiger Award at the International Film Festival of Rotterdam.
We are all proud of her achievement.