Between the decadent elite and the desolate poor lies a huge population of people in Mumbai that are forgotten, reduced to statistics, headlines and nameless, faceless odes to the city’s ‘indomitable spirit.’ 

Anuparna Roy’s quiet and observational debut feature, Songs of Forgotten Trees, pushes against this forgetting. The film, which premiered at the 82nd Venice Film Festival and was recently screened at the 69th BFI London Film Festival, is a tender, moving portrait of love, longing and intimacy in Mumbai. Like last year’s magnificent All We Imagine as Light (dir. Payal Kapadia), this film also examines the lives of lower-middle-class migrant women in the city with aching sensitivity, centering female friendship and resilience in the face of patriarchy and capitalism. 

Songs of Forgotten Trees follows Thooya (Naaz Shaikh) and her new roommate, Shwetha (Sumi Baghel). They have very different aspirations and make very different lifestyle choices: Thooya is an aspiring actress who makes ends meet through part-time sex work, while Shwetha works in IT sales and is looking for a husband on a matrimonial website. Yet over the course of the narrative, the two women develop a special bond that forms the emotional core of the story.

Roy homes in on the quotidian realities of their lives with exacting detail – their ritual preparation of dal-chawal in stainless steel pressure cookers and hot cups of chai; their blue and pink razors in the bathroom; the leaking tap; the faded walls; a red sari and nail polish that take on newer, deeper meanings of finding independence and agency. 

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Thooya and Shwetha’s relationship doesn’t grow through drama, excitement and revelations; its arc is mediated by silences and punctuated by the mundane drudgery of domestic work. Theirs is a friendship neither of choice nor convenience, but the serendipity of shared space and circumstances. One of the film’s best scenes features the two of them having a conversation while doing chores, separated by a wall: Thooya is scrubbing the laundry, while Shwetha is cleaning the toilet floor. It’s at once playful, poignant and profoundly painful.

Roy doesn’t put either character in a box as symbols for a larger point. They both exist as complex, multifaceted persons. Much of this is achieved through the layered writing that conveys as much as it conceals, leaving us to make connections and put in effort to understand the characters and their pasts. 

Thooya is reeling with the childhood trauma of an abusive father and the grief of losing her childhood best friend, Jhuma, who was married off at a young age. Some of this is revealed through lazy exposition (Thooya talks to her therapist on a video call), but the weight of it unfolds slowly and subtly over the story. 

The depiction of sex work in Songs of Forgotten Trees is deeply refreshing. Thooya is not portrayed as acting out or wayward, nor as a helpless victim. Her dynamics with her clients are varied and nuanced, and she asserts ample boundaries with them, refusing, for instance, to moan performatively for one or go down on another.

Yet Thooya constantly faces stigma and derision from the watchman of her building, who relays the complaints of her neighbours. More importantly, Songs of Forgotten Trees explores what she is seeking through sex work beyond money, what she may be running away from and how easily she can really quit if she finds it’s no longer serving her. 

Thooya’s main client is her sugar daddy and landlord (a standout Bhushan Shimpi), a sleazy, slimy man who desperately depends on her for his pleasure and fulfillment. Her tenuous position in her apartment depends on this arrangement, to which there is more than meets the eye. But the film doesn’t delve deeply enough into this, ending rather abruptly instead (its runtime is a mere 80 minutes). Similarly underdeveloped is the resolution of Thooya’s relationship with Shweta, who seems to fill the void left by Jhuma in Thooya’s life. 

Shwetha frowns upon Thooya’s vocation, but finds herself similarly having to pander to male advances and needs on the phone as part of her sales job. In a brilliant scene, the two are sharing a taxi on their way home and get into an argument about Thooya’s sex work. Shwetha points out the cruel irony that Thooya provides men with comfort, intimacy and pleasure – a kind of therapy – only to spend the money they pay her for her own therapy. To this, Thooya points to the parallels between sex work and arranged marriage: the quid pro quo exchange of sex, labour and love for financial security and stability, in both cases, a bargain not always made by choice. 

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Thooya is seeking redemption and catharsis in sex work, and Shwetha is relentlessly chasing a middle-class fantasy of marriage and a corporate career. But both are inadvertently running away from themselves, only they don’t fully realise it yet. Roy’s empathetic gaze lets these characters exist in their messiness, without judging them for not seeing things that might seem more obvious to an external observer. It also helps immensely that both lead performances are consistently brilliant, embodying the film’s naturalistic storytelling style perfectly. 

It feels like we are watching their daily lives from close proximity. Songs of Forgotten Trees unfolds like a neo-realist drama or a documentary, with a raw, matter-of-fact tone, devoid of embellishment. The cinematography by Debjit Samanta and Sakyadeb Chowdhury features long, continuous takes, framing the characters in close-ups and medium shots. The camera remains steady. Mumbai isn’t so much a character in this film as an invisible, looming presence, a stark deviation from its idealised representation in more mainstream cinema.

The claustrophobia of the tiny apartment, where most of the film takes place, is frequently juxtaposed with shots of tall hollong trees, perhaps the most poetic aspect of Songs of Forgotten Trees. These titular trees reflect the characters’ yearning for open space and nature, for their homes and roots from which they’ve been displaced into the unkind, concrete jungle they now live in. 

But Roy also laments that these trees are often forgotten, left behind in the pursuit of big dreams and a better life. So too is the humanity of her lead characters – often reduced to labels like migrants, poor, women, sex worker – beyond the sparkly sheen of the city. 

The film resists this erasure, stubbornly asserting their humanity and celebrating their melodious songs: their vivid interiorities, their memories, mannerisms, and ways of living, their stories, and their hope. Like the hollong trees that live over 300 years, they too shall endure.

Kaashif Hajee is Assistant Culture Editor at The Polis Project.

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