The Indian director Payal Kapadia employed guerrilla-style filmmaking tactics to capture the swarming streets of Mumbai in her prize-winning debut feature, All We Imagine as Light. She switched back and forth between her main camera, used for the places where she had permission to shoot, and the smaller Canon EOS 5D, which could be concealed, for those locations where she was not able to obtain permits. The 38-year-old director could not help but think of Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless, a mold-breaking debut from 64 years ago, for which similar methods were incorporated to shoot on the streets of Paris without any permits or permission.
“All of it was out of necessity because I don’t think we could have re-created Mumbai any other way,” Kapadia tells me on a video call from her home, in Mumbai. The gamble paid off—All We Imagine as Light became the first Indian film in 30 years to compete for the coveted Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. In fact, it did far more than just compete, as Kapadia became the first female Indian director to walk away with the festival’s runner-up award, the Grand Prix. “It was a lot of work on this film, which took five years to complete,” Kapadia says. “So it’s really nice that the film has gotten this kind of recognition and is going to be shown in so many countries, including India.”
All We Imagine as Light is both lyrical and gritty in its contemporary depiction of the lives of three women working at the same hospital in Mumbai. “I am always trying to have formalistic ideas with every film that I make,” says Kapadia, who studied directing at the Film and Television Institute of India (F.T.I.I.), in Pune, graduating in 2018. The daughter of the esteemed visual artist Nalini Malani and younger sister of documentary filmmaker Asif Kapadia, Payal was encouraged to pursue her creative interests.
“Fortunately for me, I was born in a family where the women before me have already set the path for me in terms of what occupation I have chosen to do and the kind of life I have decided to lead,” says Kapadia. She was exposed to the work of avant-garde filmmakers, such as Miguel Gomes, Chantal Akerman, and Agnès Varda, as a teenager in her high school’s film club and was immediately hooked.
Kapadia first came to prominence as a director with her 2021 award-winning documentary, A Night of Knowing Nothing, which denounced the takeover of India’s universities by Narendra Modi’s Hindu-nationalist government. “It was a film made out of despair,” says Kapadia, who had had her student grant at the F.T.I.I. revoked in 2015 after participating in demonstrations against actor turned politician Gajendra Chauhan’s appointment as chairman of the institute.
“It was cinema that led me to politics,” Kapadia reflects. “I joined film school as a very naïve student, and it was by being confronted by the protest that I became much more engaged with the political discourse around me.” She adds, “That was finally what changed the way I looked at cinema and the way I looked at my own work.”
Kapadia made All We Imagine as Light to show the complexity and richness of people from all over India coming to live and work in Mumbai. The film digs into the paradoxical condition of working women with financial autonomy who live apart from their families but are still governed by traditions of arranged marriage and female subservience. “I am always questioning myself as a messy feminist as to how I look at other women around me,” says Kapadia. “My mother and sister led the way for me,” she says, acknowledging her unusual vantage point. “I am much more privileged than a lot of women in my country.”
Now Kapadia is having to contend with all the attention that comes with making a trailblazing film. “I have to admit that it has been a bit overwhelming,” she says. “There is a whole different mindset to talking about a film that is finished and then to start another one. The sharp cut that I was hoping for has now become a slow dissolve.”
All We Imagine as Light is in selected theaters in the U.S. now
Tobias Grey is a Gloucestershire, U.K.–based writer and critic, focused on art, film, and books
