The elegant and pastel interiors of the Indian Navy’s Kota House in Delhi have a pop of colour and glamour today.

Anasuya Sengupta, fresh from Cannes where she won the award for the Best Actress in the Un Certain Regards category at the Cannes Film Festival, the first Indian to bag the honour, has made a stop in the Capital, where her husband, Lt Cdr Yashdeep Sharma, is posted.

“I was just happy that meri picture Cannes jaa rahi hai (My film is going to Cannes). I didn’t want anything more. That was my excitement and joy, and then came the reception to my film. People loved the film, they would come up to me on the streets and were appreciative of my performance. But I felt that something more was at play, something deeper was resonating and I think it’s because this is a film where women are at the forefront. It’s giving people a sense of hope. My film has an almost angry feminism but Payal’s (Kapadia) film is gentle and beautiful but they are both about feminism,” she says.

Kapadia’s film, All We Imagine As Light, that won the Grand Prix, the second highest award at Cannes, too, has women at its centre.

“It’s a time when we more than ever want to support each other, it’s a time for friendship, of cheering each other on loudly, being there for each other. It is going even beyond cinema. Honestly, I am seeing it everywhere. We want women at the forefront. There is deep value in it.” she says.

In Bulgarian director Konstantin Bojanov’s The Shameless, a film in Hindi, Sengupta plays Renuka who runs away from a brothel in Delhi after killing a policeman and gets involved with a young girl, a sex worker. For Sengupta, just going to Cannes was enough, getting the best actress award was overwhelming. It was all that she imagined and more. It was about cinema and glamour, about being next to legendary filmmakers, about the red carpet and buying a 25-Euro dress from the flea market to wear at the ceremony. But, as she emphasises, it’s not just about the yachts and glamour, love of cinema is at the core of Cannes.

The film also marks Sengupta’s transition from working behind the camera as a production designer to facing it. It came more than 10 years after she first acted in Anjan Dutt’s Madly Bangalee (2009), a film about a rock band which featured many members of Tin Can, the theatre group in Kolkata that Sengupta was part of.

“Acting in Madly Bangalee was, of course, very different from now. I was fresh out of college and working on that film was like hanging out with friends. It didn’t feel like acting,” says Sengupta, who graduated in English from Jadavpur University. Her first job was with a magazine called Kindle and within three months, she quit to work as a director’s assistant to Claire McCarthy in the Indo-Australian production The Waiting City that was being shot in Kolkata. That was her first foray in films and soon she moved to Mumbai where her brother, a filmmaker, lived. “I had just these two experiences but I thought that was enough ammo to move to Mumbai,” she says.

There, she did theatre and a few ads, worked as an assistant director and went on to become a production designer for films and series such as Saat Uchakkey, Ray, Chippa and the first season of Masaba Masaba, among others. “It wasn’t profoundly planned or a strategy. It just flowed from one to the other,” she says.

Wearing so many hats comes easy to her. “I had a typical Bengali upbringing. There were drawing lessons, music lessons, elocution, the works,” she says. Her doctor father and teacher mother enabled an environment that was conducive to the arts.

In fact, it was her art that got her the role in The Shameless. In 2020, a few months after the initial lockdown, Sengupta, who had been toying with the idea of doing less film work and more art and of moving to Goa, where there is a thriving artist community and where she felt welcome, finally took the plunge. As a graphic artist, she started drawing actively. Director Bojanov, who was a Facebook friend, followed her work, took note of her and eventually approached her for the role. Sengupta was taken aback but soon realised he was serious.

Thus began a journey where she prepped hard for her role, working on her fitness, running a few kilometres every day so that she could look like a tough survivor. A journey that took her to Nepal for the shooting, ended in a win at Cannes and now promises to also be a beginning. “I hope to be able to do stories and characters that inspire me,” she says. But for now, she will be heading back home to Goa where her cat Mowgli awaits her.