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When Payal Kapadia began making her film, it was intended to be a short for a student project. She expanded it over a decade, working on it intermittently while also completing two shorts plus an award-winning documentary A Night of Knowing Nothing. Her feature film debut, All We Imagine as Light, explores themes of possibility, anger, and relationships, particularly in a diverse urban setting like Mumbai.
It’s not difficult to miss the artistic overlap between All We Imagine as Light and famous Wong Kar Wai films like In the Mood for Love and Chungking Express. There is a familiarity to the pace, colour and soundscape that has led some LA columnists to suggest Kapadia does for Mumbai what Wong did for Hong Kong.
The Mumbai of today exists in a different web of narratives – All We Imagine as Light disrupts many of them. There is chaos and there is stillness, there is the crowd and then there is the inescapable loneliness that can come only in big cities. The focus on migrants (internal migrants comprise 43.02% of Mumbai's 23.5 million, according to the 2011 Census), shifts what can be a flat conversation about identity, race, religion, gender, caste, to a nuanced one, painstakingly maintained by Kapadia who directed across multiple dialects (including some she did not speak).
After Kapadia’s Q&A at the Film Forum in New York City in December, we spoke with the director to discuss the challenges of independent filmmaking in India, the impact of winning the Grand Prix at Cannes, and the importance of representation for women in cinema.
Keshia Hannam:
Why this title?
Payal Kapadia:
For me, the film is about possibility, and possibility for a character like Prabha, who doesn't see possibility because of the society that she lives in. In India, we are conditioned to accept the way things are and not really to question anything, because we're just told that this is how it is. For me, the light in the title represents possibility, especially for someone who's been told all her life that this is the only way you can live.
Keshia Hannam:
Female friendship is something I long to see portrayed more often in film. Your move did that with such honesty. Can you tell me a little bit about why you chose to anchor your characters in friendship versus, say, romantic love?
Payal Kapadia:
There is romantic love also.
Keshia Hannam:
(Laughs) There is.
Payal Kapadia:
I think it is about the female friendship between the three of them; it's also the kind of odd friendships that you get in cities, which can only be possible in cities. Especially in a country like India, where every state is so different from the other – we all speak different languages. It's a very Mumbai kind of interaction, because firstly, it's so expensive to get a flat, then you have to rent with somebody, and then it's an 11 month lease. You might hate this person, but you're stuck with them, or you might suddenly discover this entirely new person and suddenly you're sharing a bedroom with them, and they're really great – there is a lot of discovery in that process.
The second friendship between Parvaty and Prabha, Prabha is from Kerala and Parvaty's Maharashtran, and when they speak to each other, they speak a third language, which is Hindi. So that is also quite a unique friendship. Where else in India would they have met besides in a big city? It's also self contained. I feel like I wanted to sort of express my feelings, my mixed feelings about my city.
Keshia Hannam:
One of the things I said to my husband was that I felt like you captured chaos and stillness, crowdedness and loneliness and those contrasts really well. I think people really love to focus on the chaos, but the stillness and the loneliness that can come from cities is also an inescapable thing.
Payal Kapadia:
I was speaking with somebody from Mumbai who said “but I've never seen people so slow.” I responded that actually we wait all the time. We are waiting in bus queues. Waiting in doctor's clinics forever. There's a lot of waiting in cities. I'm here in New York, a city I'm not familiar with, but I see it here too: lines outside shops and things like this, because something is really particular, and people really want to go there. And so waiting is very much part of our lives.
Keshia Hannam:
I really love the opening scene of the montage of different languages and takes on Mumbai. People often flatten India, and through your film I felt you conversely showed its diversity in a unique, almost documentarian way.
Payal Kapadia:
You know this is actually very true. And because you come from there, I can say more freely: somebody was like, “Oh, do you speak Indian?” And I was like, what? Oh, God. And then someone else said: “These people are three Hindu women.” That's very presumptuous, you can’t know that 100%.
Keshia Hannam:
I would describe the film in a word as delicate, and I've read that people have described it as human poetry. Do those terms resonate with you, and were they your intent in making the film?
Payal Kapadia:
For me, it's a very angry film. But I have a lot of care for the people in the film, so maybe it comes across as delicate. The film doesn’t shy away from making the political points it wants to make. At least that was my hope and my intention. I was upset about the city and the way it treats its people, and all these things I wanted to come out in the film as something very tactile and human.
Keshia Hannam:
Do the terms female and Indian director feel important to you?
Payal Kapadia:
I have mixed feelings about this. It's important that we see representation of women's voices in cinema, where even in 2024 we are still talking about women not being nominated in the Oscars and at Cannes in such few numbers.
It's also important to know that you are part of a cinematic landscape that has so many intersectionalities that your immediate gender identity and your national identity are not the only things that define you.
Keshia Hannam:
What role did winning the Grand Prix award in Cannes play in the visibility the film is getting?
Payal Kapadia:
Even big films in India don't always do well. Exhibitors are also a bit nervous to take on unknown directors like myself with no known stars. Cannes put us on the map. We had distributors reaching out to us on their own.
Keshia Hannam:
I'm sure we all have feelings about these big institutions, but that’s really encouraging. Congratulations on being the first Indian film to win that award. I think it's also very disappointing that it's the first film, you know, but here we are.
Payal Kapadia:
It's a very sad state. We have such great films in India, and they are there in all other festivals. You know, we have a film in Venice. We always have a film in Locarno, quite often in Rotterdam, in Berlin. It's only Cannes that seems to be not looking so much at Indian films.
Keshia Hannam:
At least it seems to be changing.
Payal Kapadia:
Yes it's changing – this year was a blockbuster year for us, with one film in every section. And the short film that won in the student section was from my film school [Film and Television Institute of India]. So I was really, really happy about that. It was a great year for Indian cinema at Cannes.
Keshia Hannam:
How about how it was received in India, and what has been the difference between how it's been received in India versus outside the country?
Payal Kapadia:
In India, it went really well. We didn't have so much money to do big promotions and things. All we were doing was a bit of press and a little word of mouth, and it's got a second week, and people are picking it up. So I am so happy. It's good to get awards, and I really, really appreciate that. But the greatest award is people coming to see your film.
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