Exclusive | Payal Kapadia on her All We Imagine As Light making it to Cannes Competition: ‘Indian films’ ethos are not well understood in the West’

Speaking to The Indian Express ahead of her debut feature’s premiere, the Mumbai-based writer-director, who graduated from FTII in 2018, recounted how she kept revisiting the script over the years, taking it to writing residencies and further working on the characters. “As I collected more material, I realised that I wanted to write a film that would be longer than the 20 minutes of the diploma project,” she says. The film now spans 115 minutes.

The film’s selection came as a surprise to Kapadia. “Receiving this news felt so amazing. Later, I saw all the filmmakers who will be there (in the competition section). I was honoured to be in the company of so many people whose work I admire,” she says. To win the Palme d’Or — the top honour of the festival — she will compete with a host of biggies including Ali Abbasi, Andrea Arnold, David Cronenberg, Francis Ford Coppola, Jia Zhang-Ke, Paolo Sorrentino, Sean Baker and Yorgos Lanthimos.

In ‘All We Imagine As Light’, her first narrative feature, Kapadia follows the lives of two nurses from Kerala.

This is the FTII alumna’s third time at Cannes after her short ‘Afternoon Clouds’ featured in the Cinefondation section in 2017 and ‘A Night of Knowing Nothing’ won the Oeil d’Or (Golden Eye) Award for Best Documentary Film there in 2021.

Even with two successful outings at the French Riviera, Kapadia believes “every film is a different experience”. “You spend so many years working on each project that you totally forget this part of the process (festival participation). Suddenly, you have to shift gears — from spending all your time in a post-production studio in pajamas, you have to clean up and try to look presentable,” Kapadia says.

In ‘All We Imagine As Light’, her first narrative feature, Kapadia follows the lives of two nurses from Kerala — Prabha (Kani Kusruti) and Anu (Divyaprabha) – colleagues at a Mumbai hospital and roommates. When Prabha receives an unexpected gift from her estranged husband, her regular life is disrupted. In the space-crunched city, her younger roommate Anu struggles to find a spot to be intimate with her boyfriend. When they take a trip to a coastal town, their lives undergo a change.

“The story is about the city and the people who come to work in Mumbai. They have families back home. But they find new families in friends and colleagues in the city… As I grew older, I have started relying more on friendships. They are my support system too,” recalls Kapadia.

Making the film, however, took time as she had to raise finances for it. “I also took the time to write and rewrite,” she says, adding that she worked with script and dialogue writers from Kerala as she does not speak Malayalam.

Commenting on the 30-year gap since an Indian movie (Shaji Karun’s Swaham, in 1994) was selected for the ‘competition section’, Kapadia says: “Indian films have their own ethos and performative quality that we are used to. But it is not well understood in the West. We have our own ecosystem for films in every state that caters to the specific audience there. Which is why so many filmmakers rightly don’t feel the need for Western validation. Having said that, I also believe that even in our country it’s good to be open to different ways of storytelling which could be inspired from other countries.”

Before pursuing film direction, Kapadia studied at the Rishi Valley School in Andhra Pradesh, and got a Bachelor’s degree in economics from St. Xavier’s College, Mumbai. She later joined the FTII campus where, she says, she found her “frequent collaborators”.

“My dialogue writer for the Hindi part of ‘All We Imagine as Light’ as well as my co-writer in ‘A Night of Knowing Nothing’, Himanshu Prajapathi, was my classmate. My cinematographer is Ranabir Das, whom I met at FTII. Robin Joy, who has worked with me for the Malayalam dialogues, is from there too. There are several people who support me and it’s because of FTII that I met them,” Kapadia says.

Kapadia believes FTII gives opportunities to “more people to make films” as it is more accessible than other schools.

In fact, she points out, of the five films in various sections of Cannes this year, three are by FTII alumni. “My batchmate Maisam Ali’s film ‘In Retreat’ is in ACID (Cannes’ sidebar). There is an FTII student film — ‘Sunflowers Were the First Ones to Know’ — in the La Cinef section (it showcases film school fiction or animated films) too. Isn’t it wonderful?”

On discussions swirling these days on whether one really needs to attend film schools to become a director, Kapadia says: “I love structure though not everyone needs it. For me, going to a school was important. It really depends on the kind of person you are and what works for you. I learnt a lot from my teachers at FTII as well as the fellow students. Filmmaking takes up all your time and life. So, having friends, who can help you along the way, is a real pleasure.”

Kapadia, who until a few days ago was busy giving finishing touches to the sound of ‘All We Imagine As Light’ and running technical checks, is leaving for France on Monday evening, raring to soak in the festival vibes and meet all the filmmakers she loves.

“I studied their films when I was a student. I would love to go and tell them how crazy we were about them. Andrea Arnold, Miguel Gomez, Jia Zhang-ke, Greta Gerwig and many more! Oh, I feel so excited,” she says.