The news of Payal Kapadia’s film All We Imagined as Light making it to the competition section of the Cannes International Film Festival is a moment of pride for India. It also brings hope to the emerging filmmakers of the country, especially those outside the mainstream film industries, and great honour to the Film and Television Institute of India, of which she is an alumna. Kapadia developed the script for this film at the Three Rivers Residency in Rome, received the Bright Future Script Development Award at the International Film Festival at Rotterdam, and bagged the Hubert Bals Fund Europe Fund (HBF+Europe) for post-production support. While India’s representation at the Cannes competition section after almost three decades is significant, it must be noted that Kapadia’s film is mainly produced by four countries: France, Luxembourg, Netherlands, and Italy.
International funding: Opportunities and challenges
This international collaboration signifies a broader trend where Indian filmmakers leverage global opportunities to bring their stories to the world stage. Over the past two decades, film funds, pitching forums, and co-productions for both fiction and documentary works have propelled Indian filmmakers like Nishtha Jain, Arun Karthick, Rintu Thomas, Sushmit Ghosh, Shaunak Sen, Chaitanya Tamhane, Lipika Singh Darai, Dominic Sangma and Sarvnik Kaur, among others, to become international icons. These filmmakers spent years attempting to understand and enter the market and often expressed frustration over India’s dearth of financing, distribution avenues, and mentorship opportunities locally.
What does the international market bring to these filmmakers? Higher budgets, networks with foreign filmmakers and crew members, work-in-progress labs, opportunities for global sales and distribution, and international acclaim. However, these opportunities come with a cost. Many are conflicted by their participation in “labs” that flatten film form to character-driven narratives that feed into the Western, almost colonial, gaze toward Indian social and political realities. For example, filmmakers Khushboo Ranka and Vinay Shukla, directors of the 2016 documentary An Insignificant Man, withdrew from a co-production with a French producer when they felt the creative integrity of their project was being compromised.
These are a few of the many difficult decisions filmmakers must make while ensuring their films see the light of day. A few years ago, OTT platforms in India seemed promising for revitalising the independent filmmaking ecosystem in the country. However, many have, rather disappointingly, played their own role in homogenising formats, especially for documentary films — too obsessed with “true crime” stories while almost always avoiding any content that may be deemed controversial in the current political scenario.
Support, reorient and experiment
So, how can the problem be addressed? First, state bodies like the National Film Development Corporation must decentralise and proliferate regionally to champion unconventional narratives and support filmmakers from diverse backgrounds. In the past, NFDC has worked with some of the most acclaimed filmmakers, producing films that have been pivotal to Indian cinema history and culture; it is time to reorient itself toward emerging and early-career filmmakers. Most importantly, what is needed is an environment and an institutional ethos that allows filmmakers to fearlessly and boldly experiment with the art of cinema outside of commercial interests.
Can the state film boards across the country be revived? How can we work with the international market? How can we work through its structures, and how can we diversify its approach? What are the potential untapped resources and new modes of production we can explore? How do we make space for different kinds of practices to thrive?
Collectively, we can thrive
On our part, as filmmakers, programmers, academics, and researchers, it is time to reconfigure the idea of independence and give way to the idea of the collective. As we grapple with the challenges of production and distribution, we must develop internal ecosystems of support and collaboration, coming together to share resources and navigate through the political, aesthetic, and economic impositions of funding agencies. The assertion of our independent practices harks rather romantically to an imagined outside, where regimes of power supposedly hold no sway. But we urgently need to recognise that there is no longer an outside to the global flow of capital, and it is only through collective practice that we can find a way, push boundaries of form and aesthetics, and ultimately, imagine a new narrative to confront existing structures of power.
As Payal Kapadia’s nomination reverberates globally, it serves as a rallying cry for a revival of the ecosystem for independent filmmakers in India. And that support has to come from within, from the state-funded bodies and film practitioners alike.
The writer is a filmmaker currently teaching at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai
A still from director Payal Kapadia's film 'All We Imagine as Light', which is part of the Cannes Film Festival's main competition. (PTI Photo) 
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