Paradoxically, Sengupta is the first Indian actress to win the award in the 77 editions of the film festival so far.

"The Shameless" is a co-production between Bulgaria, Switzerland and France. The crime drama tells about the forbidden love between two Indian women.

The film was shot in Nepal and India, and the composer was the Bulgarian guy Petar Dundakov.

"I found the best actress in Cannes on Facebook. Anasuya Sengupta is very charismatic," Bozhanov told The Times of India about how he chose Sengupta for the role.

He explained that the film was inspired by a true story of an Indian woman working as a devadasi who he met while filming in the Indian state of Karnataka.

Variety describes The Shameless as a "radical vision of Indian femininity".

Anasuya Sengupta is remarkable as Renuka, a Muslim woman who takes the moniker of the Hindu goddess of the same name while on the run from the police.

She takes refuge in a brothel in a small town in northern India, where she meets Devika played by Omara Shetty.

Devika is a girl with an enigmatic grandmother (Mita Vashisht) and a harsh mother, working as holy prostitutes - devadasi, in the name of the goddess Renuka. They are looking for a client to sell Devika's virginity to, and the most promising seems to be a local politician, an Indian nationalist who frequently visits the brothel.

The romance between the two young Gen Z women played by Sengupta and Vasisht quickly blossoms into a love that challenges laws, family values, social norms and religious rules.

Bozhanov often assumes that moments of physical and emotional self-discovery as granted, focusing on how the two women deal not with research but with having been researched. The shot never shies away from physical intimacy, but the most emotionally intimate moments seem to happen between the scenes as the film leaps ahead to the dilemmas dictated by the plot, as Variety says.