Payal Kapadia: Harvester of Light

GROWING UP IN MUMBAI, Payal Kapadia watched her mother, the artist Nalini Malani, paint from nine to five, every day. Regardless of whether there was demand for it, or a commission. She was rigorous about her practice.

The same discipline infuses All We Imagine As Light, for which Kapadia, 38, won the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival earlier in the year, the first Indian to do so. Now releasing in India (on November 22), the film has won laurels for itself and its maker, who most recently snagged a place in the Time 100 Next emerging leaders in the world. All We Imagine As Light unfolds like a meditative melody. Kani Kusruti’s face as she holds onto the local train’s bar, looking as if she is on a carousel; her legs enveloping the shiny German rice cooker in a lover-like embrace; Chhaya Kadam’s character drunk dancing with the young nurse, played by Divya Prabha; Divya’s character flinging off her burqa in disgust. There is no scene that seems superfluous, or indulgent. The movie is as spare and illuminating as its themes: sisterhood, the search for independence, and a quiet rebellion.

Three women looking for a life in a city not their own. One, Kani, has been left behind by her husband who went to Germany immediately after their mar­riage; another is trying to escape an arranged marriage with some very unsuitable boys; while yet another has to leave the home she shared with her husband because she cannot find proof of residence, an elliptical reference to the demand for citizenship papers under the government’s Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2019. I mention it to her and she smiles mischievously, “Ah, you caught that, did you?”

Kapadia has an elfin-like quality, the kind of luminous invisibility that allows her to observe people as they go about their lives. The film’s prelude is shot as a documentary, chronicling the city of Mumbai, a city of immigrants, of strangers who become friends, and of families abandoned and adopted. Kapadia says, “I come from a background of nonfiction and I like cinema which mixes fiction and nonfiction. When I was working on the script I was meeting a lot of people, we did that for two years. We chose snippets of their interviews and took it to others for their response. It became like a conversation. We thought it would be an interesting way to enter the film, like a city symphony. And when Kani’s character opens the curtain, we are taking the many songs and voices of the city and choosing to make one of the many stories.”

Kapadia travelled by train, and calls herself a big eavesdropper. “The prelude is so representative of the diversity I have seen,” she says. Indeed, her camera follows the real and reel characters almost like a new friend. Each of her three characters carries a different experience of the city in her soul. Kani is weary, tired of waiting, but resilient; Divya is curious, chatty, wanting to live; and Chhaya is some­one who has taken many knocks but is still standing. The casting is spot on. “Kani is very serious, she works a lot on her body language. I wanted more silent scenes with her. Her eyes have such a complex universe. She didn’t like the character she was playing, she said she was stuck up, the ambivalence helped me,’’ she says.

When Kapadia met Divya she had just done Mahesh Narayanan’s Ariyippu (2022) in which she was very serious, and intense. “When I met her she had cut her hair, and was very bubbly. She had very nice micro expressions. As for Chhaya, I wanted her character to represent women from the Konkan who came to live in Mumbai with their husbands who were mill workers. The women had to step up and work for the family once the mills closed. It is a homage to the women of Konkan. They are the women who built the city,” she says. The architecture of the city has changed in 20 years, she adds, becoming so violently gentrified. Her movie documents the change where fishing villages and mid­dle-class homes start to coexist.

Her movie is an ode to love too. “I wanted to examine the family as a unit. They are there for us, but they also let us down. I wanted to propose a new kind of family of our friends, which a lot of women rely on. Our family relationships are so well defined and codified by religion, but friendship is an open relationship that goes beyond identity of class and caste differences,” she says.

THIS IS SOMETHING she understood most sharply when she went to the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) in Pune in 2012, after school at Rishi Valley, Andhra Pradesh, college at St Xavier’s and Sophia Polytechnic, Mumbai. Kapadia’s classmate Harishankar Nachimuthu, president of the FTII students’ association, says she was always serious about cinema. She had already spent a few years in the industry after a post graduate degree. They first met at the five-day orientation at the FTII campus; “We were friends from the time we had our first cigarette together. Both of us have stopped smoking since then,” he says. They were both direction students and in the same classroom for almost five years. The turning point was the 146-day strike, on which Kapadia based her award-winning documentary, A Night of Knowing Nothing. “It was an emotional and turbulent time for all of us,” he says of the time when some students led a protest against the appointment of Gajendra Chauhan as chairman.

The adversity bound them even closer. Kapadia also found love on the campus, with the cinematographer of All We Imagine As Light, Ranabir Das. He was a batch junior to her, and the relationship survived the strike and FTII. The case against 35 of them, across batches, still stands, though they have graduated since. The charges framed against the students include unlawful assembly, rioting, causing hurt voluntarily and threatening with grievous hurt, under relevant sections of the Indian Penal Code, besides Section 3 of the Prevention of Damage to Public Property Act. The charge sheet lists the names of the witnesses, most of them security personnel working with the FTII and police personnel present at the time of the incident and a few students. The trial is yet to start.

That was when her idea of the world was sharpened, says Nachimuthu, who teaches cinema, runs a collective, and makes his own movies. That is why, he says, All We Imagine As Light has undertones of resistance. “Her feminism is not angry. It is like her movie, intimate, graceful, feminine, sensitive and tender,” he says, which is her own unique signature. “But to see people receive it in the same way is a great gift,” he says. “The West has a very particular idea of the India it wants to see. To be able to challenge it is tremendous,” he adds.

FTII was the most diverse institution she has been to. “It was the deepest learning for me,” she says. “The rules make you closer to your classmates. Filmmaking is challenging, you’re in pain most of the time. Until then, I had studied in sheltered spaces. FTII opened up my mind.” she says. Film­making is individual and collaborative, and much as she has made very particular movies, she has funded it herself through scholarships and grants. “In the West, you can apply for grants at every stage, writing, research, pre-production. Fortunately I met producers from France early on. They don’t come from a pot of gold under their bed. For them it was their first feature film and for me too. They applied for every grant, and I am a very process driven person, I like structure, I was happy to do the grant writing,” she says.

The film was produced by Thomas Hakim and Julian Graff through their France-based company Petit Chaos, in co-pro­duction with the Indian companies, Zico Maitra’s Chalk & Cheese Films and Ranabir Das’ Another Birth, as well as by the Netherlands’ BALDR Film, Luxembourg’s Les Films Fauves, Italy’s Pulpa Films and France’s Arte France Cinéma. It made the French Oscar shortlist, but the country eventually chose auteur Jacques Audiard’s redemption thriller Emilia Perez, which won two major awards at Cannes, for the international feature film race. In India, it was released by Spirit Media, founded by Rana Daggubati, which acquired India distribu­tion rights for the film.

Her advice to young filmmakers is simple, “You have to keep at it, negotiating with someone who will give you money or apply for grants which gives you freedom is the choice,” she says. Her two short films at FTII, Afternoon Clouds (2017) and And What Is the Summer Saying? (2018), showed her the possibilities outside the mainstream. Afternoon Clouds was shown at the students’ section at the Cannes Film Festival and she realised she wanted to work with people who have the same taste in cinema, with whom you can have a discourse. Kapadia walks the talk on dialogue. Kani says her filmmaking is collaborative, “She makes it a point that everyone involved in the film actually gets involved. She will explain to the crew and cast with the same intensity, depth and respect for our feedback,” she says.

Why did the film resonate around the world? Some questions about women’s friendships, solidarity, being there for each other, are universal. “They may not have hunger, poverty, inequality but they relate to issues in their system,” says Kapadia.

So, is she a Mumbai girl or has she now been Frenchified? “I am a Mumbai girl, but I am always leaving and coming back,” she says. And always looking for light.

To watch the video of the interview click here

All We Imagine as LightBollywoodcinemaIndian societyMen-women relationship