All We Imagine As Light: Payal Kapadia excited for Indian, American releases over global honors

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Payal Kapadia’s acclaimed film, All We Imagine As Light, won the Grand Prize at this year’s prestigious Cannes Film Festival. Celebrated by audiences at top festivals such as the Toronto International Film Festival and the New York Film Festival, and earning a perfect 100 percent critics’ score on Rotten Tomatoes, the award-winning motion picture begins its theatrical release in India as well as New York and Los Angeles on November 15.

The light, the lives and the textures of contemporary, working-class Mumbai are explored and celebrated in the film, which centers on two roommates who work in a city hospital — head nurse Prabha and recent hire Anu — plus their coworker, cook Parvaty. Kapadia’s film alights on moments of connection, heartache, hope and disappointment to create a soulful study of the transformative power of friendship and sisterhood in all its complexities and richness.

Written and directed by Payal Kapadia, the film stars Kani Kusruti, Divya Prabha, Chhaya Kadam, Hridhu Haroon and Azees Nedumangad. Prabha (Kani)’s husband from an arranged marriage lives in faraway Germany, and she is courted by a doctor at her hospital. Anu (Divya) carries on a romance with a Muslim man, which she must keep a secret from her strict Hindu family. Parvaty (Chhaya) finds herself dealing with a sudden eviction from her apartment.

“The director captures the bustle of the metropolis and the open-air tranquility of a seaside village with equal radiance, articulated by the camera with a lyrical naturalism that occasionally drifts into dreamlike incandescence,” says a raving media release, which goes on, “All We Imagine As Light is a soulful study of the transformative power of friendship and sisterhood, in all its complexities and richness.”

At a tete-a-tete in Mumbai on October 17, the writer-director along with Telugu icon Rana Daggubati (Co-founder, Spirit Media), who will distribute the film, interacted with the media.

Payal, who has an innate tendency to overtly giggle and chuckle, was asked what excited her most about the unprecedented honors her film has received. “I am most excited now about our Indian and American releases!” she said. “Also, I would like to request everyone in India as well as America to go watch the film! It’s about a metropolis and its theme can apply to any big city. In addition, it is about friendship.”

She added, “This film is about Mumbai, which is your city, yet it’s not! I have been a Mumbaikar always, but when you leave this city and live elsewhere for a while and come back, you evaluate it differently. Mumbai has always been a city of contradictions. You have a love-hate relationship with Mumbai. It’s one of the few places where you can work late and go home, but it is an expensive city. Navigating it is also tough despite the modes of travel.”

Why did she home in on Rana to distribute the film? “I saw that he had a well-planned distribution approach. He was sensitive to the film and, for him, it was not just about the money.”

The film was born when Payal was studying in the final term at the Film & Television Institute of India and there was a “hospital situation with family.” Payal observed the women in the hospital in their working space. “I spent time on research, and it was not easy to make a film in a language (predominantly Malayalam) different from those I knew. Then came the funding issues, and now after five years, here we are!”

“This kind of cinema is not usual for me!” Rana smilingly quipped. “But it’s hard to release small films. Unlike in many other countries, our governments give no grants to filmmakers. My own career started with a small, independent film, I did a few more too, but my small films too had a regional connect, and that’s what made things a bit easier.”

As the protagonists are from Kerala, the film will premiere in India in Kerala on November 15, and gradually, Spirit Media will organize releases across the country.

Elucidating on cinema today, Rana said that he was motivated to handle this film principally by the fact that India is so diverse and that we must show our different cultures. “I first watched the film with my wife and was blown by the first 10 minutes!” he added. “I thought it would be great if I was able to show this film everywhere.”

He went on, “A part of the reason for the difficulty in releasing such films stems from the fact that while every other country has one industry, we have so many regions, and each region is almost a country by itself, making films. It was our TV channels, hunting for more content, who decided to dub some hit movies that ultimately led to the opening of this movement where we were exposed to cinema from other regions. And so, though our cinema is over a hundred years old, the universal appeal across the country is just four or maybe five years old!”

The concept of a “pan-Indian release,” he added, “originally started with my Bahubali, though! It is an overused term now! But this is not one of those films that need to be dubbed in many languages, yet as an independent movie, thanks to its global exposure and release, it is bigger than many a mainstream movie!”