Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic When Payal Kapadia finally took her Cannes Grand Prix-winning film All We Imagine as Light to Mumbai, it felt like a long-awaited homecoming. In the place she calls home, and where the film is set, it opened the Mami film festival in the historic art deco Regal cinema, one of the last remaining single screens in the city. The late October weather was oppressively warm, but it also rained that day, notching up the humidity. Evoking sweaty train rides and pouring monsoon rains, it was a fitting reflection of the atmospheric imagery in Kapadia’s film.“It was super nice,” recalls the writer-director from her home in Mumbai. “Finally the film is back where it belongs, and I’m very happy that people took very different things from it.”Since Cannes, Kapadia has been travelling the world as her Malayalam-language film has become a festival darling, receiving near-unanimous critical acclaim, collecting awards and generating Oscar buzz. For Kapadia, an up-and-coming filmmaker who made her debut feature film on a shoestring budget, this level of success has come suddenly.However, she is no stranger to Cannes. In 2017 her short film “Afternoon Clouds” was included in a section for new talent, and in 2021 her hybrid docu-fiction A Night of Knowing Nothing, set amid student protests at her alma mater, appeared in the Directors’ Fortnight section and won the L’Oeil d’or award. But her real exposure into the limelight came only this year, as All We Imagine as Light, which was largely produced and financed in France, became the first Indian film to appear in Cannes’ main competition in 30 years. Kapadia lays the blame for this dearth firmly with the festival. “I don’t know why they didn’t choose other Indian films,” she says, mildly exasperated. “We make really good films, so that’s on them . . . Eeb Allay Ooo! by Prateek Vats was in the Berlin Film Festival’s Panorama section in 2020 — it’s a great film. Rima Das makes amazing work. Anamika Haksar’s films are absolutely radical — so other festivals have been selecting Indian films regularly.”All We Imagine as Light follows two Malayali nurses from Kerala — Prabha (played by Kani Kusruti) and Anu (Divya Prabha) — who work in a Mumbai hospital and share a crammed and wind-battered flat with a pregnant cat. Prabha is tightly wound to the point of sullenness and is a stickler for morality. Her husband purportedly lives in Germany but hasn’t been in touch for more than a year. The younger Anu, on the other hand, is a free spirit who secretly sexts with her boyfriend. What’s more, she is Hindu and he is Muslim, something frowned upon or even restricted by law in parts of India (though not in Mumbai). She also slips pregnancy pills under the counter to women patients who have little reproductive agency. When the duo’s mutual friend Parvati, a hospital cook, is forced to move because of gentrification, Anu and Prabha embark on a road trip to help her settle back into her village.The film captures the push and pull of existential challenges in the big city and ponders questions of identity, belonging and displacement. Shot in gauzy shades of blue and ochre, Mumbai serves as a muted backdrop as Kapadia quietly ruminates on life on its peripheries. She admits she doesn’t know how to define her film, but the women at its centre epitomise the hardworking migrant labour that powers one of the world’s largest metropolises. This may explain its broad appeal. “I think people from big cities like New York and Paris identified with it,” she says. “This thing about happenstance female friendships in such places is something that I think speaks to everybody.”Kapadia was interested in exploring the intergenerational friendship between the three women and wanted to dissect the question of love and desire in South Asian households. “Prabha’s relationship has this kind of legitimacy because she’s a married woman. But Anu is in love with a boy that nobody will accept. Even though she’s in love, it’s [considered] illegitimate,” she says. The secondary character of Parvati grew from Kapadia’s urge to portray Mumbai’s gentrification. She says that moving back to the city after studying in the neighbouring city of Pune, she was shocked to see how much Mumbai had changed. “The areas I grew up in — Lower Parel and Dadar — had especially gone through a kind of violent gentrification. I felt that I needed to have a character who embodied the pain of that,” she says.She also wanted to unpick complex identity issues in multicultural Indian society. “I was interested in this odd friendship between a Marathi cook [Parvati] and a Malayali nurse [Prabha], which in real life is not very common. In my utopian imagination, I wanted to say that this could be a possibility. Because I think that in India identity comes in the way of a lot of things. At least in friendship, it shouldn’t be the case — that’s my hope,” she adds.While global and Indian festival audiences and critics took to the film immediately, All We Imagine as Light faced public criticism from an unlikely source. The Film Federation of India (FFI), when considering India’s submission for best international feature at next year’s Oscars, commented that Kapadia’s film felt like “a European film taking place in India”. The honour was given instead to Kiran Rao’s feminist dramedy Laapataa Ladies.Although she has cited European auteurs such as Chantal Akerman and Agnès Varda as influences for their blending of fiction and documentary, Kapadia’s sensibilities are clearly grounded in India. Her film studies curriculum was packed with the work of the masters of Indian Parallel Cinema, a movement noted for its unvarnished realism that began in the 1950s with the seminal Satyajit Ray and continued through to the 1980s with luminaries such as Mani Kaul and Shyam Benegal. Kapadia was influenced by the work of Govindan Aravindan and John Abraham, who made probing films about the human psyche on frighteningly small budgets. Abraham’s filmmaking style especially fascinated her. “I was inspired by his technique — editing, sound design and the use of stop-motion,” she says. “He packs in small moments of delight in very political films.”Emulating this approach, Kapadia used a handheld DSLR camera to capture the everyday Mumbai street scenes her film opens with — workers unloading produce early in the morning, sellers sorting their wares, the throng of humanity on trains and at festival time. Shooting on tightly packed streets made her more aware of their personal space, she says. “I’ve always been a bit shy to put cameras in people’s faces. I tried to be mindful and the process taught me to be not intrusive.”What emerges on screen is the gaze of a filmmaker capable of seeing humanity in the tiniest details of her subjects, bringing together elements of Indian arthouse and the European New Wave. For Kapadia, it was vital for her that All We Imagine as Light got a theatrical release. “I hope the [success] sends a signal that films like mine are worth funding and distributing,” she says. “It is really important to me that the film has a life in cinemas so its journey is truly complete, unlike dumping it directly in streaming platforms.”‘All We Imagine as Light’ is in UK cinemas from November 29Find out about our latest stories first — follow FTWeekend on Instagram and X, and subscribe to our podcast Life and Art wherever you listen
