Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine As Light became the first Indian film in the last 30 years to enter the competition at the Cannes Film Festival
Chetan Anand’s Neecha Nagar took India to Cannes all the way back in 1946 for the first time. It told a story of a group of villagers protesting against a landlord and won the Grand Prix award (which later became Palme d’Or) at the festival. To date, no other Indian film has won this prize.
The last time an Indian film got nominated to compete for the Palme d’Or was in 1994 when Shaji Karun’s Malayalam feature, Swaham, entered the competition, and lost to Quentin Tarantino’s gangster drama, Pulp Fiction. And now, 30 years later, Payal Kapadia has taken us to the prestigious competition at the festival, with her film, All We Imagine As light. Fascinatingly, and perhaps unsurprisingly for her abilities, this is not her first time at the Cannes.
Born in Mumbai, Kapadia shifted to Andhra Pradesh to do her schooling in Rishi Valley School. She did her bachelor’s in economics from St. Xavier’s College, Mumbai, and followed that up with a master’s degree. Later, she went to the Film and Television Institute of India to study film direction. Even during her time at the institute in 2017, her short film, Afternoon Clouds, secured a premiere at the Cannes festival. Three years later, in 2021, Kapadia’s personal-meets-political fable, A Night of Knowing Nothing, won the L’Oeil d’or for Best Documentary Film at the 74th edition.
That film begins with a student, “L”, at FTII reading some letters she wrote for her estranged partner. Her caste identity becomes a reason for their separation as his parents disapprove of their relationship. The film features scenes from the college campus and visuals from student protests in the universities across the country. Kapadia had seen this world closely enough to become its living document. The film’s dreamy merging of fact and fiction was unusual, and captured the spark of an emerging uneasiness felt by the youth with intimate layering accomplished through the philosophical observations in the voiceover of L. In a way, that film carried the same spirit as Neecha Nagar in its rebellious zeal to fight injustice. Decades apart, both films are Brecht’s voices singing in dark times about dark times.
This feeling of collective hope is further evoked in the name of her new film, All We Imagine As Light, which tells the story of two nurses from Kerala, employed at a Mumbai nursing home. One of them, Anu, is on a quest to find a place to get intimate with her boyfriend. Her roommate, Prabha, gets a shock when she receives a gift from her estranged husband.
Even this story, although a work of fiction this time, has emerged from Kapadia’s personal life. She lived with her grandmother all her life and when she needed full time care, nurses would stay with them. It was through her conversations with the nurses that she was able to make sense of the inner loneliness pervading their lives. She then pitched the film for Cannes festival’s Cinefondation Résidence, a programme designed specifically for young filmmakers around the world. She wrote this Indo-French production film at the residency, working from an apartment in Paris.
All We Imagine As Light will compete against veteran director Francis Ford Coppola’s science fiction drama Megalopolis, Greek filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos’ Kinds of Kindness and Paul Scrader’s Oh, Canada. The presence of these giant filmmakers and their enduring cinema stands testament to the glory of this achievement, as Payal’s film joins other Palme d’Or nominees from India, like Satyajit Ray’s Parash Pathar (1958) and MS Sathyu’s Garm Hava (1974).
