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Random freezes, missing sound and display glitches usually trace back to one bad driver. Find and replace yours safely.Free scan · under a minuteAnuparna Roy’s 2025 film Songs of Forgotten Trees follows Thooya and Swetha, two migrant women sharing a flat in Mumbai. Their connection grows through the small routines of living together—cooking, exchanging stories, sitting in silence and offering care. Roy describes their bond as platonic love, though critics have also seen the possibility of romance in its ambiguity.
Two women, one Mumbai flat
Thooya, played by Naaz Shaikh, sublets a room in her flat to Swetha, played by Sumi Baghel. Thooya is an aspiring actress who secretly does part-time sex work; Swetha is a migrant call-centre employee. The film follows two people with different pressures and routines as they begin to make a shared home.
The official Venice Biennale listing describes their relationship as a “platonic kinship.” Rather than treating sisterhood as literal family, the film presents it as a fragile closeness formed between women who are not related.
How their sisterhood develops
The bond is built through ordinary gestures rather than a single declaration: the women cook, share stories, keep one another company and sometimes sit together without speaking. In a Scroll interview published September 2, 2025, Roy calls this connection “platonic love.” She says, “I was trying to understand the complexity of the relationship of a woman with another woman.”
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- 50 Well-known Carols Arranged for Any Combination of Voices
- Arranged for Chorus
- Standard Notation
- Publisher: Hal Leonard
- 56 Pages
The film’s official synopsis adds that buried desires and past wounds test the bond. Its tenderness is therefore not presented as simple or secure: intimacy makes room for care, but also for uncertainty.
Is the relationship romantic?
The sources leave room for more than one reading. Roy’s description and the Venice synopsis frame the women’s closeness as platonic. A Guardian review published August 12, 2026 asks whether that closeness might be romantic, while describing the ending as ambiguous. That is the critic’s interpretation, not a definitive label supplied by the film’s official synopsis.
Rank #2
In its Sight and Sound review published December 8, 2025, the BFI focuses on fragile intimacy and companionship. It highlights a scene in which Swetha pretends to be Thooya’s long-lost school friend. The moment makes their emotional connection visible without settling what category it belongs to.
The apartment as part of the story
For Roy, the flat is more than a setting. “I wanted to focus on a space that has a bigger existence than the people staying inside it,” she told Scroll. The film uses the rooms and shared spaces to shape how the women encounter one another, making everyday proximity part of the drama.
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Rank #3
- Pages: 122
- Instrumentation: Piano
- Instrumentation: Piano/Keyboard
The BFI review points to doorways, a mosquito net and fragments of mirrors as visual frames around the women in cramped interiors. These details can make the apartment feel enclosing even as the relationship inside it grows more intimate. The living space holds both the limits of their circumstances and the possibility of companionship.
Work, performance and pressure
Thooya and Swetha each move between roles. Thooya pursues acting auditions while keeping her sex work private; Swetha performs customer-care work from home. The BFI reads both characters as repeatedly cast into roles. The Guardian also draws attention to male entitlement in the story, including the flat owner’s expectations and demanding customers. These are critical readings of the film’s specific situations, not claims about all sex work, call-centre work or life in Mumbai.
Rank #4
What Roy brings from memory
Roy has connected elements of the screenplay to both personal memory and observation. In the Scroll interview, she recalls a school friend named Jhuma: “I realised when I was around 22 or so that I had been carrying Jhuma in my head.” She also links her observations of city life to moving to Mumbai in 2022.
The director’s statement on the Venice Biennale listing places the film within a wider concern for women whose stories are erased by social systems. Roy writes, “My film is an attempt to reclaim narrative space for the unseen, the complex, and the quietly resilient.” That intention meets the film at the scale of the flat: two lives that might otherwise go unnoticed become the focus of sustained attention.
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Film details
- Director and screenwriter: Anuparna Roy
- Year and language: 2025; Hindi
- Runtime: 77 minutes, according to the Venice Biennale listing
- Central characters: Thooya (Naaz Shaikh) and Swetha (Sumi Baghel)
The Guardian reported that the film would open in UK cinemas on August 14, 2026. That release information is specific to the UK; viewing availability elsewhere can vary by territory and date.
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