Riding high on the screening of her film Rang Rasiya at Cannes, Nandana Sen talks about her upcoming projects and what it is to be Amartya Sen’s daughter in Bollywood

How was it at Cannes? Any interesting reactions to you and your film Rang Rasiya (Colours of Passion)?
It was exhilarating and exhausting in a fun way. Colours of Passion was an absolute success . Everyone seemed to have loved the extraordinary film Ketan Mehta has made. It got sold in a number of territories and we got invited to various film fests. Quite unexpectedly, I got a strange but fascinating mix of offers at Cannes—an Italian co-production based on a story by Mahasweta Devi, an American fantasy which would reinvent me as a good witch, a Canadian-Italian drama in which I’d be the bi-racial daughter of Malcolm Macdowell, a Bengali romantic comedy about a zamindar and a nautch girl and a Spanish love story about an immigrant girl in Madrid (yes, I can speak Spanish). Cannes is the ultimate playground of dreams, both realistic and absurd. One should enjoy it fully and not take any of it too seriously, except the film you’ve come with. 

You aren’t unknown to the global film festival circuit. What, according to you, sets Cannes apart from other festivals?
What I love about festivals is the opportunity to watch the best films from around the world. This time at Cannes, I was invited to be on the jury of a few international festivals, and to be the official programmer for another. That would be more fun than the adulation I get as an exotic actress. But what’s beautiful about Cannes, other than the all-important business aspect, is that it is truly a public celebration—people pour in from all over the world to soak up these two weeks. And it has a tremendous appetite for beauty. Everyone on the street is dying to be enchanted.  

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