Payal Kapadia: Indie Auteur

THE CANNES FILM Festival sets itself as the cultural alternative to the Oscars. If the Academy Awards represents an inward American gaze, its tastes often predictable, Cannes has the reputation of a more refined palette, the films shown here a reflection of everything exciting that is happening in world cinema. India’s presence at the festival has been growing in recent years, but it has been usually limited to the red carpet. Only the occasional Indian film is screened, and rarely ever in competition. As reproaches go, it seemed particularly damning—good enough for the fashion, not the cinema.

This is what makes Payal Kapadia’s Grand Prix—the second most prestigious award at the festival after the Palme d’Or—for her film All We Imagine as Light so noteworthy. If one were to look for the last Indian film to be selected to compete for this main section, one would have to go back all the way to Shaji Karun’s Malayalam film Swaham 30 years ago.

All We Imagine as Light, which has been described as “dreamlike” and a “gentle modern Mumbai tale”, tells the story of two nurses from Kerala who live as room-mates in Mumbai, each of them in a particular moment in their lives. The older among the two hasn’t heard from her husband for a while, and the younger one is causing some scandal because she is dating someone from the Muslim community.

The film grew out of a diploma project. Kapadia, then a student of Film and Television Institute of India (FTII), became interested in the subject when her grandmother, after experiencing a fall, had to hire a nurse. “She [Kapadia’s grandmother] hired a nurse… as she lived alone… Spending time with them, I got interested in these women who come from different states to Mumbai to work,” Kapadia told the Indian Express. But as she worked on the project, reworking its script and characters over several years, Kapadia realised its scope was much larger than the 20 minutes a diploma project would lend itself to. In this period, she also worked on other projects. Her short film Afternoon Clouds was featured in Cannes’ Cinéfondation section in 2017, and her documentary A Night of Knowing Nothing won Cannes’ Oeil d’Or (or Golden Eye) Award for Best Documentary Film in 2021.

While Kapadia is now being celebrated by the Indian film industry, the country’s mainstream industry has little to do with it. All We Imagine as Light was made painstakingly over several years entirely outside the regular confines. Important sources of support were found abroad. Kapadia has praised FTII for the opportunities it provides to aspiring filmmakers, and many of her collaborators in fact were people she met on campus, but she was also one of the students whose scholarship grant was cut when they protested against the appointment of Gajendra Chauhan as FTII’s chairman. Had the film not been feted at Cannes, it would probably have struggled to find much viewership outside the festival circuit.

The film reflects a growing recognition of the country’s independent cinema. Despite the funding constraints and the near-absent theatrical distribution network, many Indian indie films have been winning laurels in recent times. The Disciple and Pebbles picked up awards at the Venice and Rotterdam film festivals, respectively; Writing with Fire and All That Breathes were nominated for Oscars, the latter also picked up an award at the Sundance Film Festival. There were several moments for India’s indie film scene, beyond Kapadia’s win, at this year’s Cannes festival too. Most notable amongst them was Anasuya Sengupta picking up Best Actress in the Un Certain Regard section for her performance in the film The Shameless; the first and third prizes in the La Cinef section going to two Indian films (Chidananda S Naik’s Sunflowers Were the First Ones to Know and Mansi Maheshwari’s Bunnyhood); Santosh Sivan receiving the prestigious Pierre Angénieux Tribute award; and a restored version of Manthan being screened to a packed auditorium.

These achievements highlight an alternate vision of cinema in India. The film landscape may be dominated by Bollywood, but Kapadia and her contemporaries are carving out a new space for more original storytelling.

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Lhendup G Bhutia

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