Anasuya Sengupta became the first Indian to win a top acting award at the Cannes Film Festival on May 24 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 on its star cast. The film was shot over a month and a half in India and Nepal.

Bojanov, an award-winning director, incidentally, is 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’.

Receiving the award, a “shaking” Anasuya dedicated it to “the queer community and other marginalised communities for so bravely fighting a fight they really shouldn’t have to”.

Her voice shaking with emotion, and drawing repeated cheers and applause, she ended her short acceptance speech by saying, “We don’t need to be colonised to know how very, very pathetic colonisers are.”

(This story was taken from a syndicated feed, and edited only for style by Gujarat Samachar Digital staff)

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