Anasuya Sengupta becomes first Indian actor to win Cannes' Un Certain Regard Best Performance award

Anasuya Sengupta, one of the leads in Bulgarian filmmaker Konstantin Bojanov's Indian film 'The Shameless', has won the Un Certain Regard Best Performance award. She's the first Indian actor to win the award.

Anasuya Sengupta, one of the lead stars of Bulgarian director Konstantin Bojanov's Hindi-language Indian movie The Shameless, has created history by bagging the Best Performance award in the Un Certain Regard category at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival.

Sengupta, who hails from Kolkata, is the first Indian artiste to win the category's top acting honour, marking a significant milestone for India at the prestigious film gala, which concludes on Saturday. Prior to this, Baby Naaz had received Special Mention (child actress) for her work in Boot Polish by Prakash Aurora in 1955.

ALSO READ: Cannes 2024: Meet Anasuya Sengupta, the Masaba Masaba production designer who turned ‘The Shameless’ actor in this queer thriller

CANNES, FRANCE - MAY 24: Boris Lojkine, Abou Sangare, Louise Courvoisier, Tawfik Alzaidi, Vicky Krieps, Todd McCarthy, Xavier Dolan, Maïmouna Doucouré, Asmae El Moudir, Guan Hu, Liang Jing, Eddie Li, Anasuya Sengupta, Abdullah Al-Sadhan, Roberto Minervini, Maria Bahrawi and Bandar Alabdulsalam pose onstage during the Un Certain Regard closing ceremony at the 77th annual Cannes Film Festival at Palais des Festivals on May 24, 2024 in Cannes, France. (Photo by Cindy Ord/Getty Images) | Photo Credit: CINDY ORD

In her acceptance speech on Friday night, Sengupta dedicated the award to “to the queer community and other marginalised communities" for bravely fighting for their rights all around the world.

“You don’t have to be queer to fight for equality, you don’t have to be colonised to know that colonising is pathetic — we just need to be very, very decent human beings," the actor said.

Sengupta is an “out and out” Calcutta girl, a La Martinière student who went on to major in English literature from Jadavpur University and dabble in theatre at a young people’s theatre group Tin Can — where she made lifelong friends. She starred in a bit part in Bengali director Anjan Dutt's rock musical Madly Bangalee (2009) and then moved to Mumbai. Bollywood found her "unconventional", acting gigs didn't come by, so Sengupta found her calling as a production designer, with such Netflix shows/films as Masaba Masaba Season One, a film in the RAY (2021) anthology, Noblemen (2019), and Q aka Qaushiq Mukherjee’s Brahman Naman (2016).

The Shameless, which had its premiere at Cannes on May 17, is an exploration of the dark, unsettling universe of exploitation and misery in which two sex workers, one who cannot escape it even if she tries running away after avenging herself, and the other a young girl who's also condemned to a life of prostitution. The two forge a sublime bond in this lesbian love story. Sengupta plays the central character of Renuka, who escapes from a Delhi brothel after stabbing a policeman to death and takes refuge in a community of sex workers in northern India, where she meets Devika (Omara Shetty), a young girl from the devadasi community and is days away from her ritual initiation.

The Shameless, which has been shot in Kathmandu, also stars Omara Sengupta, Mita Vashisht, Tanmay Dhanania, Rohit Kokate and Auroshikha Dey in key roles.

British-Indian filmmaker Sandhya Suri's Santosh, starring Shahana Goswami, was also part of the Un Certain Regard but didn't win any award.

The Un Certain Regard, which runs parallel to the festival's main competition, aims to highlight new trends, new paths and new countries of cinema.

The top prize of the segment went to Black Dog by Chinese filmmaker Gou Zhen, while French director Boris Lojkine's L’Histoire de Souleymane bagged the Jury Prize.