It’s the beginning of a beautiful partnership between mainstream and alternative cinema: Actor Rana Daggubati, distributor of Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine As Light

According to Daggubati, his Spirit Media distributing Kapadia’s film marks “the beginning of a beautiful partnership between mainstream and alternative cinema”. He says: “Let’s move forward with it and I’m sure we will see more such partnerships.” For Kapadia, whose earlier films ‘Afternoon Clouds’ (short, 2015) and ‘A Night of Knowing Nothing’ (documentary, 2021) had only special and festival screenings in India, finding a supportive distributor means a lot. “It is great as an indie filmmaker not to worry about the movie’s distribution”, says Kapadia. Her biggest joy is that “people will be buying a ticket to watch” her film.

The coming together of Kapadia, an indie filmmaker with pronounced arthouse sensibilities, and Daggubati, a popular mainstream star of movies such as Baahubali: The Beginning (2015) and Baahubali 2: The Conclusion (2017), can be hailed as a major development in Indian cinema. Daggubati has been on the lookout “for independent voices that can tell cinematic stories” and has backed several Telugu films in the past.

Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine As Light.

“Earlier, Spirit Media had never ventured beyond (Telugu films) since it is not easy to put out our independent cinema in this commercial world”, says Daggubati. However, when the actor-producer watched ‘All We Imagined As Light’, he was excited about its craft and aesthetics. “It was the right film for us to put the muscle behind and take it around the country. The film is truly pan-Indian in that sense. You will connect to the Mumbai city, immigrants living there and creating a life for themselves,” he says. When they met, Kapadia liked that Daggubati had a well-thought out distribution plan for her film “so that it won’t be lost when released in theatre”.

Emphasising on blurring the language barriers while promoting Indian movies, Daggubati says: “When I used to work in Mumbai earlier, I suggested releasing the film in Telugu. The makers never got it. Ditto when I talked about releasing a Telugu film in Hindi. I made ‘The Ghazi Attack’ (2017), Hindi producers thought I am making a Telugu film and vice versa. We shot it in both languages. That’s how we released it. It was a story set in a submarine and it did not matter in the language it was in.” After the massive success of ‘Baahubali’, Daggubati believes, the filmmaker started thinking of projects with pan-Indian appeal. “In India, once we know something works, we scale it up. It is ultimately about knowing your audience and finding them,” he adds.