Anasuya Sengupta becomes first Indian to win top acting award at Cannes

Anasuya Sengupta became the first Indian to win a top acting award at the Cannes Film Festival on Friday night. The little-known actress, who has worked mainly as a production designer in Mumbai and lives in Goa, took home the Best Actress award at the Un Certain Regard segment of the festival. Sengupta won the award for her gritty role in Bulgarian director Constantin Bojanov’s film, The Shameless, which also features well-known actress Mita Vashist. The film was shot for over a month-and-a-half in India and Nepal.

Bojanov, an award-winning director, incidentally, was Anasuya’s Facebook friend. He caught her by surprise when one day out of the blue he asked her to send an audition tape. That was the start of the Jadavpur University graduate’s acting career.

The previous credits of the Kolkata-born debutante actress include being the production designer of Srijit Mukherjee’s Forget Me Not in Netflix’s 2021 Satyajit Ray anthology and Masaba Masaba. She plays Renuka, a vagabond seeking refuge in a northern Indian community of sex workers after fleeing from Delhi on being charged with murder. The film’s story centres around Renuka’s illicit love affair with a teenager, Devika, played by Omara Shetty.

Anasuya dedicated the award to ‘the queer community and other marginalised communities for so bravely fighting a fight they really shouldn’t have to’. Her voice shook with emotion as her short acceptance speech ended, “We don’t need to be colonised to know how very pathetic colonisers are.”