In Songs of Forgotten Trees, Anuparna Roy offers a cinematic experience that ventures into intimate territories—spaces that are rarely shared and yet define our way of being in the world. The film seems to speak to us from the other side of a wall: we hear murmurs, sense gestures, and try to complete with our imagination what remains hidden. It is a story about the desire to see and, at the same time, about the danger of looking too closely.

The narrative centers on the coexistence of two women in the vastness of Mumbai. Thooya, who dreams of making her way as an actress, and Swetha, an office worker who rents a room in the apartment they share. What begins as simple indifference gradually transforms into a fragile and ambiguous relationship, marked by silences more eloquent than words. Physical closeness does not guarantee emotional closeness, and Roy turns this paradox into the heart of her film.

The city, vibrant and chaotic, serves as the backdrop for a shared isolation. Its inhabitants live side by side, yet remain strangers to one another. This portrait of urban loneliness is reflected in everyday gestures: eating together without speaking, passing one another in the hallway, listening without daring to ask more. Roy reminds us that in large cities we can be surrounded by millions of people and still feel completely alone. The apartment Thooya and Swetha share becomes a metaphor for this tension: a domestic space that should serve as a refuge but instead reveals the invisible boundaries between those who inhabit it. Closed doors, narrow hallways, or half-obscured frames constantly suggest that something is kept out of sight. In this way, the spectator becomes an indiscreet witness to a bond that never fully takes shape.

Both women carry with them their own lacks and secrets. Thooya seeks recognition through her craft, though that recognition is always tinged with artifice. Swetha, on the other hand, tries to find affection in fleeting dates that never materialize into real connection. What they share is the void, the impossibility of fully reaching the other, and at the same time the unspoken desire to keep trying again and again. The strength of Songs of Forgotten Trees does not lie in what it states explicitly, but in what it leaves unresolved. The bond between the protagonists is woven from minimal gestures, from advances and retreats, until we realize that intimacy can be as elusive as love. Roy avoids easy answers: her choice is to present life as a terrain of incomplete desires, encounters that brush against possibility but never reach fulfillment.

In the end, what lingers is a feeling of strange familiarity—as if we ourselves had once shared that same silence, in our own home or in someone else’s life. Songs of Forgotten Trees invites us to contemplate those cracks in human experience where what is unsaid weighs more than any word.