All We Imagine as Light, Payal Kapadia’s swooning feature film, premiered to rave notices at this year’s Cannes Festival, before winning the competition’s Grand Jury prize, the runner-up to the Palme d’Or. It was the first Indian film since Swaham, Shaji N Karun’s 1994 drama, to premiere in competition on the Croisette.
“When I got an email from Cannes saying that the film is in the competition my first thought was, ‘Do they have the right email?’ I have a really nice group of people that I work with – my producers and my editor and you know. And when you work with people who you really love to work with, that’s already the reward.”
The thirtysomething film-maker is a festival veteran. Her shorts And What Is the Summer Saying? and Afternoon Clouds premiered at the Berlinale and Cinéfondation. A Night of Knowing Nothing, her hybrid documentary portrait of a cross-caste couple and student unrest, won the L’Oeil d’Or prize at the 2021 edition of Cannes. That freewheeling spirit carries over into All We Imagine as Light, which was often shot guerrilla-style on the streets of Mumbai. Her Malayalam-speaking cast contributed important cultural advice during the shoot.
“I’m not the kind of person who always knows the game itself,” the writer-director says. “I like to work and work and see where it takes me. I wish I could shoot all the time like this, because it’s much more free. I think reality is so interesting. Nobody can give you more than what reality can give you. Especially in Mumbai, where the street life is very lively.
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“I couldn’t afford to re-create a big street. I would have had to pay 5,000 or 6,000 people. So we had to do it our way. The actors just pretended to be the characters. I didn’t have to tell them anything, as we have been working together for so long. They had recording devices hidden inside their clothes. I really like films that mix fiction and nonfiction. Films by Agnès Varda and Chantal Akerman that transcend reality in some way.”
All We Imagine as Light is about three Keralan nurses living in Mumbai. Two of them, the compassionate, no-nonsense head nurse Prabha (Kani Kusruti), and the younger, romantic Anu (Divya Prabha), are roommates. We learn that, not too long into their arranged marriage, Prabha’s husband moved to Germany for work. At the city hospital where Prabha works, she is romantically pursued by the courtly Dr Manoj (Azees Nedumangad). Anu has fallen in love with a Muslim boy, Shiaz (Hridhu Haroon), a relationship she must keep a secret from her Hindu family. Prabha’s best friend, Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam), a retired and widowed nurse, faces sudden eviction when greedy developers acquire her apartment.
Mumbai is a city where there’s an increasing divide between those who have access to public space and those who do not. That gap concerns me
“I wanted the film to focus on women who are not from Mumbai but come from a different place,” Kapadia says. The characters are from Kerala, in the Malayalam-speaking southwest of the country. “Because I was setting the film in a hospital, I felt it was a good resource to talk about a lot of other things, specifically related to the women. The Malayali nurses are very well known to be great nurses. They leave their homes and work in different cities. You will find Malayali nurses in hospitals everywhere. It is a bit of a cliche, but I thought that the cliche worked. I thought they should be from Kerala.”
The unflappable Prabha is shaken when a shiny red rice cooker arrives in the post. The appliance was sent from Germany, a gift from the husband she has not heard from in a year. In the strangely magical world of All We Imagine as Light, the appliance takes on the significance of the mysterious Zone in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker or the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
“In India we eat a lot of rice. It’s pretty much like our bread,” Kapadia says. “We eat far more rice than chapatti or naan. In the south, especially, rice is very common, but not everybody has a rice cooker. That’s a bit aspirational. If you rise in your class, then you might get a rice cooker.
“It also embodies the idea of a woman who can take care of a larger family. Prabha hopes to have a family someday. So the rice cooker is an object that is sold to women as a capitalistic dream, bound up with the family structure. I find the way these objects are shot in ads very sexy. They glitter. They tell you to run out to buy an air fryer. And then it sits in your kitchen with other unused appliances.”
The rice cooker is one of several disruptions that strengthen the intergenerational bond between the three women. A petted pregnant cat takes up residence in Prabha’s apartment. More intriguingly, the three women make a pilgrimage to a quiet beach town, a liminal space where the heroine has an imagined or possibly otherworldly dialogue with a man saved from drowning. In earlier, similarly spooky scenes, a dying woman in the hospital imagines a visit from her late husband.
“I like cinema that is slightly supernatural,” Kapadia says. “In India we have fables because women can’t always express their feelings. So you find fables and folktales where sometimes the husband is a ghost or a tree or a dog. It’s a way of talking about something when you don’t know how to deal with it.”
In one much-admired sequence, Prabha, sitting by herself, cries in a crowded cinema. Ranabir Das’s twinkling camerawork adds to the sense of a cityscape that is simultaneously thronged and lonely. Ideas and arguments about gentrification and alienation are lightly kneaded into the script.
“Mumbai is a city made up of people who are always in a state of flux,” Kapadia says. “They come from outside and don’t have legitimacy. It’s a city where there’s an increasing divide between those who have access to public space and those who do not. That gap is something that concerns me.”
Family looms large over Kapadia’s work as a film-maker. The daughter of a psychoanalyst father and of the painter and video artist Nalini Malani, she was inspired to write All We Imagine as Light by her own extended-family experiences with four generations of women and a sister who is nine years older.
“When I was growing up, talking about dreams was very much part of our daily lives,” she says. “I remember I would wake up and we’d sit down to have tea together, and I would tell my father what I had dreamed. It was just for the fun of it. But I think of dreams as being important. I think of dreams as being very much part of reality.”
The two Cannes prizes are a fairy-tale ending for a career that hasn’t been easy. In 2015, as a student at the prestigious Film and Television Institute of India, Pune, Kapadia and her classmates protested for 139 days following the appointment of a member of BJP, the ruling Hindu right-wing political party, as the institute’s chairperson. She and her fellow demonstrators faced disciplinary action, and she lost her scholarship. The same chairperson congratulated her on her Cannes success. A Night of Knowing Nothing was not distributed in India.
In September there was considerable kerfuffle when the Film Federation of India, a non-governmental, all-male body of producers, distributors and studio owners, selected Kiran Rao’s Laapataa Ladies, a comedy in which two veil-wearing brides accidentally swap husbands, as India’s official submission in the Oscars’ best-international-feature category for 2025. It’s worth noting that the 2023 Cannes Grand Prix winner, Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest, won the Academy Award for international feature this year. Kapadia’s exclusion has been variously criticised as sexist, misguided and orientalist. Kapadia is rather more generous.
“There are so many films made in India,” she says. “There are so many studio films, especially with Netflix and Amazon now making movies in India. There are a lot of film industries in India. There’s the Tamil film industry and the Malayalam film industry. That industry has a lot of independent film-makers finding new ways to make their films.
“I ended up going to Kerala a lot for casting, for meeting people. I felt really supported there, because even the big actors are willing to give you time. And I’m coming from nowhere. I feel that just because we won a prize in Cannes doesn’t mean we should be selected by the committee. The film that was selected was made by a wonderful film-maker.”
All very civil.
All We Imagine as Light is in cinemas from Friday, November 29th
