{"id":195340,"date":"2024-12-19T22:26:54","date_gmt":"2024-12-19T21:26:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/iffr.com\/en\/?p=195340"},"modified":"2025-05-19T16:36:37","modified_gmt":"2025-05-19T14:36:37","slug":"blog-payal-kapadia-on-all-we-imagine-as-light","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/iffr.com\/en\/blog-payal-kapadia-on-all-we-imagine-as-light","title":{"rendered":"Be there for each other: Payal Kapadia on All We Imagine as Light"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Kapadia\u2019s Hubert Bals Fund-supported, CineMart-spotlighted, fiction debut is set to screen at IFFR 2025 after a sensational prize-winning festival run that sees it top a number of ‘Best-of-2024’ lists, not least Sight and Sound <\/em>and The New York Times<\/em>. The Golden Globe-nominated director explains her bitter-sweet relationship with Mumbai, using documentary techniques, and the role of IFFR’s support in bringing the film to life.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Indian filmmaker Payal Kapadia credits the nonfiction process on her poetic, transcendent documentary debut A Night of Knowing Nothing<\/strong> (2021) for freeing her approach to fiction. \u201cSome people are very good at sitting in their house and imagining something,\u201d she says with admiration, but for Kapadia, the real inspiration comes from going out into the world and gathering evidence. This same yearning for liberation flows through the protagonists in her Hubert Bals Fund-supported fiction debut All We Imagine as Light <\/em>\u2013 two nurses and a hospital cook in Mumbai whose escape from society\u2019s constraints lies in their imaginations. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u201cWe would just be in the car and take these travelling shots.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Embarking on the feature, she sought to gather testimonies and images to create an \u201carchive of ideas\u201d. She interviewed people who moved to Mumbai in order to find a better life, and with her cameraman Ranabir Das, went out into the city \u201cevery chance we got\u201d to gather footage. \u201cWe would just be in the car and take these travelling shots, which kind of became the style of the opening sequence of going across Mumbai.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Divided into two parts, Mumbai is the backdrop to the first, bathing the lives of the three nurses in the melancholic blue of the monsoon season night. Prabha and her younger roommate Anu work together in the hospital, yearning for a world where Prabha can reunite with her estranged husband who works in Germany, and where Anu can live freely with the boy she\u2019s dating. When their friend Parvaty faces eviction at the hands of city developers, they take a trip to the coast for the second act where bright, saturated hues emerge. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u201cI think when you leave a city and come back, you really see the change in it.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe seasons are monsoon and then not monsoon, that’s all there is\u201d, explaining how the moody atmosphere matched the inner worlds of her characters. \u201cIn Hindi cinema, you’ll often find lovers dancing in the rain. And it’s \u2018oh, so nice\u2019, but actually, it’s a miserable time to be living in Mumbai because it’s horrible to get to work every day. Your train stops, your socks are wet.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The rain gives weight not only to her character\u2019s emotions, but the changing urban dynamics as well. \u201cI think when you leave a city and come back, you really see the change in it\u201d, she reflects. Going to school in the south of India and film school in Pune, she was always struck by the pace of the city\u2019s development. \u201cEspecially if you see the skyline in Mumbai, it’s changed so much. Every time there is a new building.\u201d The film is shot largely in Lower Parel, an area formerly home to the communities who worked in the area\u2019s textile mills, before they were closed following labour disputes in the 1980s. \u201cIt’s not just gentrification \u2013 it’s a violent takeover because of the real estate boom.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u201cIt’s not just gentrification \u2013 it’s a violent takeover.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

At the same time, there\u2019s a beauty to the way Kapadia captures Mumbai, contrasting the loneliness, alienation and suspended time of life spent on public transit, with the possibility for connection: the poetic advances of Prabha\u2019s doctor colleague and scenes from the Ganpati festival, for example, accompanied by the gentle sounds of Ethiopian pianist, Emahoy Tsegu\u00e9-Maryam Gu\u00e8brou. Mumbai, she says, \u201cgives a lot of opportunity compared to the rest of the country. Mumbai has a more free feeling, especially for women.\u201d It\u2019s all part of Kapadia\u2019s bitter-sweet relationship with her home city.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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When making her film school graduation project in 2018, Kapadia spent a lot of time in hospitals with family members. \u201cI started hanging around a lot with some of the nurses I met and also started seeing the space of a hospital as a very interesting microcosm of the country, or the city, especially because it’s one place where there are a lot of women who work.\u201d This became the basis for the film, with the hospital the perfect setting to \u201cdelve deeper into the zeitgeist of what was going on in the country.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u201cTo have a grant at this stage, it’s really great because then you don’t have to take up commercial work to survive.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

A year later, it had outgrown a film school project and was presented to the Hubert Bals Fund. \u201cIt’s a fund that if you go to film school in India, you know about because it’s the first one that you can apply to. You don’t need a European producer to apply, which is a great, great thing if you’re just starting out a project and you don’t have all your partners in place. You can apply directly and there are not too many grants like that.\u201d The fund awarded the project Development Support with a \u20ac9,000 grant, which proved vital for getting immersed in the research. \u201cTo work independently, to have a grant at this stage, it’s really great because then you don’t have to take up commercial work to survive.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Kapadia relishes the development process \u2013 applying, pitching, finding collaborators, securing funding. \u201cI always tell young filmmakers who are complaining about writing for grants\u2026it’s a good process if you put yourself through it.\u201d Keeping your project fresh is what\u2019s important. \u201cI think it\u2019s always good to continuously move forward, otherwise, it’s a very lonely and sad place to be an independent filmmaker.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With development funds in place, Kapadia was selected for Cannes\u2019s Cin\u00e9fondation Residence, where she began working with her French producers petit chaos, who suggested an application to IFFR Pro\u2019s co-production market CineMart, where the project was selected to participate in 2020. The process of attending the market, where the project was given a mentor familiar with the script, allowed Kapadia to solidify her ideas. \u201cCineMart was the first time that I was pitching the project with such clarity\u2026that editing process for the presentation, it helped me a lot because then it made me think about exactly what was important to me.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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All We Imagine as Light<\/strong> presentation at CineMart 2020<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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\u201cMeeting people and meeting technicians from around the world, it enhances your project so much.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

At CineMart, she met Frank Hoeve from BALDR Film, who would later become a co-producer on the project with which they could apply and receive production funds from NFF+HBF, a collaboration between the Netherlands Film Fund and the Hubert Bals Fund supporting Dutch co-productions, as well as HBF+Europe: Minority Co-production Support, supported by Creative Europe \u2013 MEDIA.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Keeping the balance in the creative team despite a four-country co-production structure was vital, with Kapadia ensuring her crew remained local and familiar to her, for the most part. Post-production was done in France and the Netherlands, with the latter handling colour grading and extra sound recording. \u201cMeeting people and meeting technicians from around the world, it enhances your project so much\u201d, she says of working in the international context. \u201cIt’s only a good thing.\u201d  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u201cThat we can in some way be there for each other.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

There\u2019s a universal appeal to her approach, that places women at the centre but never victimises or pities them. That can partially explain its festival success, winning the Grand Prix at Cannes and screening across the world at festivals like TIFF, San Sebasti\u00e1n, Shanghai, Durban, Mostra de S\u00e3o Paulo and plenty more. But filmmaking is a personal endeavour, she says. \u201cThese are the themes that bother me, and I think that is the good thing about diversity in filmmakers for their point of view.\u201d Enabling personal views to come to the fore is what the film industry needs: \u201cthat’s why we must support filmmakers of all different backgrounds, coming from different places, coming from different access of resources, different languages, different genders, different sexual orientations, and that is how we will have diversity in cinema. I think that’s what the HBF is about, and that’s why IFFR is a great festival also.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Finding these connections \u2013 \u201cthat we can in some way be there for each other\u201d \u2013 is where Kapadia finds hope, and where her films do too. \u201cThat, I feel, is the only sort of reconciliation I have with the times we’re in.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The HBF+Europe programmes are supported by Creative Europe MEDIA<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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A list with articles<\/h2>\n\t\t\n\t\t
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