What was it that got you to focus on Mumbai, the city? Your film, All We Imagine As Light, is talking about so many things. It’s talking about alienation, belonging, migration, women. You’ve spoken about how you got to know a couple of Malayali nurses when your father and grandmother were being nursed some years ago and that’s when you started to think about these people as human beings, as people who have desires, and in a way that not too many people look at them. So, what was it that actually got you to this film?
More than anything else, I wanted to make a film about women coming to work in a city like Mumbai. It’s a city that I have a love-hate relationship with. It’s a city that gives us a lot of opportunity. Especially for women, it’s a little bit more safe and there’s a kind of professionalism and work ethic where women can be more comfortable. You move to a city like Mumbai and there is some amount of joy and liberation in that.
You felt that when you moved there?
I am actually from Mumbai but I didn’t always live there. I went to school in Andhra Pradesh and so I can’t say that I have childhood friends from Mumbai or that kind of connection. Maybe that’s why I can be a little bit more distant from the city and its allure. It’s a very complicated city because at the end of the day, it’s very brutal. Also there is constant displacement within the city… it’s always in a state of flux.
So this feeling of a constantly changing city and for somebody who’s kept going and coming out of the city, you see those changes much more, especially in the area where the film is situated, which is Lower Parel and Dadar. These are areas that used to have cotton mills, largely until the ’80s and ’90s. If you now go to that area, you’ll only see one chimney left of the cotton mills and they’ve been replaced by these giant buildings. These are often like multinational corporations or gated communities where there are separate elevators for the staff and residents. They’ve become malls and spaces that whoever lived there before could never actually access. It’s a very violent gentrification that has taken place.
There were all these elements of Mumbai that frustrated me but I still find myself attracted to the city. So I’m confused and that’s in the film I think. And I always wanted to make a film about intergenerational friendship because that’s something that I have thought a lot about in my personal life.
The hospital space became a place where I could talk about all these different elements and have different kinds of friendships. One of the things that I keep saying is that sometimes your family lets you down but friendship is a very open relationship. Friendship can go beyond the limitations of your immediate identity and, perhaps, create a new kind of bond depending on the two friends and no one else. Everything in our lives is so codified— mother, father, so much weightage is put on these relationships, but friendship is open and that’s nice.
Divya Prabha and Kani Kusruti in a still from All We Imagine as Light.
Can you talk a bit about the nurses who looked after your father and your grandmother and how you got to know them?
My father is often in the hospital because he suffers from dementia. It started when I was a student at FTII (Film and Television Institute of India, Pune), and since I was the most vela (free) person in the family, I had to sit and wait outside in the waiting rooms. Even if my grandmother had a fall, I was sent to be with her. At that time, I was writing my diploma film (at FTII), and when you’re a film student, everything is interesting. So whenever I would get a chance to chat with the nurses, I would. I made friends with some of them. Also the hospital space for me was interesting because I could talk about many other things like contraception or just other things about women’s bodies.
Your film is a co-production and a lot of money has come from France. How important was it for you to have got the funding from a place which is not Bollywood, which doesn’t bind you to the kind of things that you would have to do if you were getting money in India?
As a student in FTII, I had a film that travelled a bit, called And What is the Summer Saying, and the French producers I work with, saw the film, liked it and got in touch with me. The French producer, Thomas (Hakim), had also only made short films until then, so it was a journey that we took together.
We stayed in touch after this festival and he said that in France, they have a different system and you can apply for funding and make the film that you desire without market forces being the primary reason to make the film. So I discovered the French funding system through them. It is very well structured and it makes the process a little less lonely.
How important was it for you to have that big Cannes moment when you won the award (Grand Prix)?
It was really surreal. We were so happy that we could make the film, that we could finish the film the way we wanted to. When it got selected, we were ecstatic. And for our French producers also, the Cannes festival is very important. Then we got a call. If you win a prize in Cannes, they tell you in the morning that you have won something, wear nice clothes and come. But they don’t tell you what prize you have won. So there is a bit of anticipation.
There has been a whole lot of talk about the Oscars and how your film was in the fray and then finally, how it didn’t make the cut. What were you feeling then?
Honestly, with this film, everything that we’ve gotten beyond making the film has been like a bonus. One of the nicest things for me that came out of the Cannes win was that we got distribution in India, which I think is really important. A lot of independent filmmakers make a film but it doesn’t get shown in cinemas because there’s such a lot of competition. Even big films right now, you know, sometimes don’t do well.
…I think that the film that they chose (Laapataa Ladies for the Oscars) is a very nice film and I enjoyed watching it very much. It’s a director whose previous film too I loved.
You were talking about Chhaya Kadam’s character (Parvathy), about how you lived in a house for 22 years, but because you didn’t have any documents, you could not say that you lived there. How did that character come about? You are saying something really important in today’s time where identity and religion have become so important as markers for the life that we are living.
I feel that the character of Parvathy is synonymous with women, especially women from the Konkan region. It was again a way of linking the scenario back to the mills. Through the 20th century, there has been a lot of migration from the Konkan region to Mumbai, especially of men who worked in the mills. And then when the strike happened, everybody lost their jobs. It was the women who had to step up and become bread winners of the family. They had no time for self-pity, it was like ‘just get on with it’ and I feel that is such a strength of the Maharashtrian women of Mumbai.
For me, that’s a very important characteristic of the women in Mumbai, who are from Ratnagiri and Raigarh areas. I wanted it to be an ode to them as well because an erasure of a particular history of a particular region in Mumbai has been systematically going on. I felt I should talk about it in the film because Bombay can’t be talked about without that.
Payal Kapadia's All We Imagine As Light won the Grand Prix at Cannes. 
Divya Prabha and Kani Kusruti in a still from All We Imagine as Light.
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