Anuparna Roy's Lovers in the Blue Night Won the NETPAC Award for Best Asian Film at Venice in September 2026, and Two Indian Films, Selvi and Birds in the Dark, Won Prizes at Busan in October

Anuparna Roy’s Lovers in the Blue Night won the NETPAC Award for Best Asian Film at the 83rd Venice International Film Festival in September 2026, according to reports dated 13 and 14 September. It is Roy’s second feature and the second year running that a film of hers has come home from Venice with a prize. A month later, two more Indian independent films won at the 31st Busan International Film Festival in South Korea: the Tamil drama Selvi and the Punjabi Birds in the Dark.

The Venice prize and who gave it

Lovers in the Blue Night was shown in Orizzonti, the Venice section for new and independent films. ThePrint, carrying a PTI wire report, says it premiered there on 11 September 2026, was the only Indian feature in the section’s competition, and was up against 14 other titles.

The NETPAC prize is given by NETPAC’s own jury, separate from the juries of the festival itself. The festival’s site lists its main awards as announced at a ceremony on Saturday 12 September 2026. NETPAC stands for the Network for the Promotion of Asian Cinema. Culture360, the Asia-Europe Foundation’s arts portal, says it was founded in New Delhi in 1990 and is headquartered in Singapore. NETPAC’s own site calls itself a platform for the discovery and promotion of Asian cinema.

According to the PTI report, the NETPAC jury praised the film’s sensitive portrayal of marginalised lives and of the intersecting experiences of migrant workers, and commended Roy’s confident filmmaking and its treatment of displacement, urban survival, desire, gender and poverty. Roy described the moment on social media as “a little surreal, a lot of gratitude,” the same report says.

What the film is

The festival’s own catalogue page gives the details. Lovers in the Blue Night runs 107 minutes, is listed as Hindi, and is an India and USA production. Roy wrote and directed it. The cast is Neelima Sharma, Pritam Pilania, Bhushan Shimpi, Jatin Sarin, Kajal Keshav and Vinod Suryavanshi. Debjit Samanta shot it, Ketul Thakkar edited it, and the producers include Vikas Kumar of Khan & Kumar Media, Sharib Khan of Ammi Media, Bibhanshu Rai and Romil Modi. International sales are with Parallax Films.

The festival’s synopsis describes four migrants in Mumbai searching for love and a sense of belonging in a city that offers them very little. The PTI report adds that the characters speak Hindi, Sylheti and Marathi.

In her director’s note on the festival page, Roy says the film draws on her own experience as a migrant and on watching working-class lives dissolve into the rhythm of the city. She also recalls asking a farmworker named Ameena, as a child, why she and her husband never slept together, and the woman’s quiet answer. The film moves that memory into an imagined Mumbai.

The year before

Roy’s first feature, Songs of Forgotten Trees, was also in Orizzonti, at the 82nd festival in 2025, and the festival’s page for that edition lists it as the Best Director winner. Akashvani News, All India Radio’s news service, reported on 7 September 2025 that the award was announced by Julia Ducournau, president of the Orizzonti jury. The festival describes the 77-minute Hindi film as the story of two migrant women in Mumbai whose lives slowly connect. The Quint and HighOnFilms both describe Roy as the first Indian to win Best Director in the Orizzonti competition.

Busan: two Indian films in one section

The 31st Busan International Film Festival ran from 6 to 15 October 2026. Outlook India reported on 24 August, when the line-up was announced, that Birds in the Dark and Selvi were the two Indian titles in Vision-Asia, a section of directors from 10 countries and regions.

The Vision awards were presented on Wednesday 14 October at the Signiel Busan Grand Ballroom, Screen Daily reports. Its list gives Selvi the Hylife Vision Award and the Taipei Film Commission Award, and Birds in the Dark the Songwon Vision Audience Award for Asia. The Mongolian film Zogsool led the night with four prizes. The festival’s own homepage, checked on 29 October 2026, showed the main Busan Awards but not the Vision winners, so the Vision results here rest on Screen Daily and on Indian trade reports that agree with it.

Selvi, a nurse’s long shift

Selvi is the first feature of the Tamil director Sailesh Rathnakumar. Anjali Patil plays the title role, a migrant home-care nurse who takes over her best friend’s shift after the friend collapses; the Hollywood Reporter India describes the film as unfolding over 24 and then 48 hours, with migration, exhaustion and unseen labour as its subjects. Patil produced it through her company Anahat Films. Outlook reports that the Red Sea Fund co-produced it, and that it had earlier been picked as a work-in-progress project at the 24th Hong Kong-Asia Film Financing Forum.

It premiered on 9 October to a full house, and its later Busan screenings sold out, Outlook reports. Asked about the wins, Rathnakumar told Outlook, “It’s going to give a lot of hope to a lot of independent filmmakers just like us.” The film is next due at the 50th São Paulo International Film Festival, where Hollywood Reporter India and Outlook both say it will compete. Patil told Outlook the team plans impact screenings across India, aimed at healthcare workers and working-class audiences, and that “this impact screening will give us a path to take our film to the entire India.”

Birds in the Dark, in black and white

Birds in the Dark (Hanere De Panchi in Punjabi) was written, shot and directed by Shashank Walia. It is a black-and-white film set in rural Punjab during a farmers’ uprising, with dialogue in dialects of Punjabi, Kashmiri and Urdu. Hollywood Reporter India and Outlook list the cast as Mauli Singh, Sapna Das, Harwinder Aujla, Shahnawaz Bhat and Navdeep Bajwa.

The producers are Reema Kaur for Two Black Squares, and Hansal Mehta and Sahil Saigal for True Story Films. Mehta said before the festival that he was proud to make his producing debut at Busan and called the film an “exquisitely meditative painting on gender, labour, justice and love,” Hollywood Reporter India reports. The Songwon audience prize carries 10 million Korean won in cash, Outlook and Hollywood Reporter India both say. The film had its world premiere in Busan’s Vision section.

Where things stand on 29 October 2026

The pages opened for this article give no Indian release date for any of the three films. Outlook reported on 13 September that Lovers in the Blue Night was due for its Asian premiere at Busan, but the Busan results above do not list it, so that screening is unconfirmed here. Rathnakumar and Patil told Outlook they hope to secure an Indian festival premiere for Selvi before a domestic release and are still weighing distribution, with a six-month release window in mind. On the national stage, Gondhal is India’s entry for the 99th Academy Awards, and the 72nd National Film Awards were presented on 22 September 2026.