Anasuya Sengupta made history on Saturday as the first Indian to win the Best Performance award in the Festival de Cannes un Regard category. She received it for Bulgarian director Konstantin Bojanov’s The Shameless.

Upon receiving the award, a visibly emotional Anasuya said, “This is for the queer community everywhere, and all other marginalized communities all over the world... You don’t have to be queer to fight for equality, you don’t have to be colonized to know that colonizing is pathetic — we just need to be very, very decent human beings. More female gaze is the way forward.”

The Shameless was initially being made as a documentary exploring the themes of “love, sexuality, free will and artistic expression, within the confines of the castes and religious beliefs of present-day India,” the director said in an interview for the Cannes official platform, adding how eventually it evolved into a feature inspired by the true story of a girl born in the devadasi system.

About casting Anasuya in the pivotal role of Renuka, Bojanov said, “I looked at her pictures on Facebook and said, ‘She fits my vision of Renuka perfectly.’ It was more than just her appearance; it was her attitude too. I knew that she was primarily a production designer. Nonetheless, I took a chance...”

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Born and brought up in the Lake Gardens locality of south Kolkata, Anasuya is an alumnus of La Martiniere for Girls, Kolkata, and completed her graduation from the Department of English, Jadavpur University. She debuted with Anjan Dutt’s 2009 rock musical film Madly Bangalee and has worked as a production designer in Sanjeev Sharma’s Saat Uchakkey (2016) and Srijit Mukherji’s Forget Me Not in the anthology Ray (2021). She is now based in Goa, where she works as an illustrator and production designer.

The Festival de Cannes un Regard category celebrates cinema of discoveries, and its mission is to bring out new trends, new paths and new countries of cinema. This year, 18 feature films were screened in this category. Guan Hu’s Black Dog took home the Un Certain du Regard prize while Abou Sangare won the best actor award for the film L’Histoire de Souleymane.