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“I Had Given Up on this Film”: Payal Kapadia on All We Imagine as Light
All We Imagine is Light On a dull white piece of archival paper measuring 39.3 x 27.3”, ghoulish figures in wispy gray and red stenciled figures are engaged in various jousting poses. Text is sandwiched between the figures: “One day the streets all over the world will be empty. From every tomb I’ll learn all we imagine of light.” The 2016 painting by Nalini Malani, one of India’s foremost video artists, is titled All we Imagine of Light. Years later, her daughter Payal Kapadia would ask to borrow and rework the title for her film All We Imagine As Light, which would eventually go on to win the Grand Prix at the 2024 Cannes Festival and play at festivals including New York Film Festival before opening theatrically worldwide.
Three women live in Mumbai and work as nurses: Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam) is the oldest, Prabha (Kani Kusruti) is perhaps in her 40s and Anu (Divya Prabha) is the youngest who has recently moved to the city. They speak different languages, lead different lives, but the three coworkers form a deep kinship rooting them in an alien city constantly trying to push them out.
Kapadia’s previous film, the documentary A Night of Knowing Nothing, was set against student protests on Indian campuses, a subject she is all too familiar with. During her time at India’s Film and Television Institute, for 139 days from June till October 2015 she and classmates protested the appointment of a Chairperson who is a member of BJP, the ruling Hindu right-wing political party. The students faced disciplinary action and were denied their scholarships; the same man made sure to issue a public congratulatory statement on her Cannes win.
Ahead of All We Imagine As Light’s American theatrical release, I caught up with the double-Cannes winning filmmaker who, despite being jetlagged, very enthusiastically spoke about her process, the film funding landscape in India and the immense privileges of her life that she has learnt to accept. All We Imagine enters release from Janus Films and Sideshow Film this week.
Filmmaker: You grew up with an artist mother. Was a career in the arts pre-destined?
Kapadia: When I was growing up, I decided, “I will have nothing to do with art.” This was my rebellion. But when I went to the [state-funded film school] Film and Television Institute of India, I realized what a privilege I had had, for all those years, and that I took so much for granted. In India, it’s so hard for people to get access to art, to cinema that’s not mainstream. I began to realize that I had been extremely privileged growing up with this access. For the possibility that one could have the job of being an artist to be normalized is so rare. My friends have all had to struggle with this—they’d say they want to be filmmakers but their family wouldn’t support them.
Filmmaker: This film is dedicated to your grandmother and your friend who’s a nurse. How did you come up with this story?
Kapadia: At a particular time in my life, I had two family members admitted in two different hospitals in Mumbai. I didn’t have much to do, so I was spending a lot of time in hospitals: hanging out, waiting around, sitting for long hours. I made friends with some of the nurses, which piqued my interest in wanting to have nurses as the main characters in a film based in Mumbai. Nursing is a profession where women leave home to work in other cities and caregive. It’s considered to be a “good profession.” So, I felt that it would be a good way to talk about women and work, and Mumbai as a city and what it offers.
Filmmaker: And what is your relationship to Mumbai?
Kapadia: I was born there, but I didn’t study in Mumbai. I went to school in south India and moved back to Mumbai for college. Then I went to FTII in Pune [about 100 miles away]. When I moved back after FTII, it was with all my friends who graduated with me, for whom Mumbai was not a city they knew, so I was seeing it through their eyes. It was a nice kind of freedom, but it’s also so expensive. People have to pay so much money to be able to live and have a decent life. I saw that through my friend and the complications of city life got more and more in my face. I was also thinking a lot about the gentrification of Mumbai, something that has been in my mind for a long time.
Filmmaker: That shows up in the film too. Parvaty’s home is being torn down to make way for an apartment complex.
Kapadia: Yes, there are areas they don’t want you to see, so there’s just a flyover bridge that goes over it, [like the poorer, populous, and largely Muslim neighborhoods of] Mohammed Ali Road and the older parts of Mumbai, like Chor Bazaar. Then you come to [the very posh] Lower Parel, which used to be the cotton mills. Now those mills are luxury shopping malls and gated buildings where there are separate elevators for residents and their house staff. Maybe things were always like this and I was too naive to see it, but now this violence of gentrification feels a lot more in your face.
Filmmaker: Your characters all come from other parts of the country, which is true of people of Mumbai, of course. But there has also been a history of violence between people from the state of Maharashtra [Mumbai is its capital] and those who come from other states to live and work here.
Kapadia: For me, Mumbai is about diversity. Some people say Maharashtra is only for Maharashtrians, but even the Maharashtrians who come to Mumbai from different regions suffer. Maharashtrians who used to work in the mills, who live in chawls [tenements], are being thrown out of the city. It’s really not about Maharashtrians; it’s about the city not being for people who don’t have money. That’s why we ask in the film: is this a city of dreams, or a city of illusions?
Filmmaker: It’s obviously such a city film. Can you tell me some of your favorite city films?
Kapadia: So many! News from Home by Chantal Akerman, with her moving to New York and writing letters to her mother. it’s shot really well, and I thought a lot about that movie while shooting Mumbai: Vérité style, magic hour. I mean we don’t have magic hour, we have magic five minutes, but the desire was there, with the neon lights and that kind of thing. Then there’s Taipei Story by Edward Yang. Agnès Varda’s Cléo from 5 to 7. I love Pratidwandi (The Adversary) by Satyajit Ray. All of Wong Kar-wai. Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s Millennium Mambo is a great city film.
Filmmaker: You play so well with language in the film. They all speak different languages. Prabha and Anu speak Malayalam with each other, broken Hindi with others including Parvaty, who has a different mother tongue. It’s all subtitled in English for the audience. Were you wary of flattening all these layers?
Kapadia: I have made a new version where I’ve put in the subtitles what language the characters are speaking in, and I’m a bit worried that it causes some distancing. But then somebody was telling me that even if I write “Malayalam” and then write the dialog, people will say, “What is Malayalam like?” Some people don’t even know it’s a language. So, what can I do? I’m very confused.
In the Konkan region [where Parvaty is from], they refuse to speak Hindi. The Malayalis also don’t want to speak Hindi. It’s not their language. I wanted this struggle to show up—people can’t speak Hindi, it’s a real issue. In Dr. Manoj’s character, we see that there is this presumption that everybody can speak this language, which is idiotic. So, I wanted to have people speaking in all these different languages in the film.
Filmmaker: This is a great segue into my next question about the documentary elements in the film—those shots of people in the streets, voiceovers from “real” people who are not characters in the film.
Kapadia: For me, a story like this, when juxtaposed with documentary, creates a different kind of montage to make it feel like there are many such stories and we are picking one out from the city-symphony. As the curtains open, we are invited into the world of fiction. In the opening sequence, you see Anu sleeping, which you wouldn’t know because you don’t know yet that she is a character in the film. I wanted the audience to be like, “This can be any woman from the ladies compartment [of the local train].” For me, that makes it feel more true, more real.
Filmmaker: But do you think that there is that big philosophical difference between documentary filmmaking and non-documentary?
Kapadia: No, it’s all the same, but the process of doing it is different, which I struggled with a lot with this film. We’ve worked in a way that’s more free; we just did whatever we wanted to. But now there was a budget, a producer, and you only have that many days to shoot, so it’s a whole different mindset. But we tried to shoot a lot of the nonfiction elements by ourselves. We had a small camera, and just roamed around and shot extra things. I like to work like that. It’s more fun for me.
Filmmaker: Tell me a bit about what happens when you bring that free filmmaking school of thought to the rigidity of a set.
Kapadia: I want to cry! But there are some perks. What I enjoyed very much is making the mise en scene, deciding on color, deciding the costumes in great detail, looking at swatches and deciding upon the perfect blue. I love that in films—the particularity of arrangement, construction of the image. So yeah, I think I’m just greedy and I like cinema.
Filmmaker: Did you always know which actors to cast?
Kapadia: I had this great ambition two years ago when I started casting. I thought that I could cast actual people from the streets to do these roles. Just went to show my privilege, because I met some 200 women for the character of Parvaty and chatted chatted with them for a long time, which is where some of the masala [ingredients] for the documentary parts came from. I believed they would quit their job and act in my movie. They were just like, “No, sorry. You can’t just saunter into our lives and offer us some role. You want us to quit our jobs of 20 years?” It was really presumptuous of me. So, then I was like, “Okay, I should get actors.” I approached Chhaya Kadam [Parvaty] because I felt that only she could do this role. I had seen her in Fandry 10 years ago and was a huge fan. She’s from Ratnagiri originally, the region Parvaty is from. So, she came up with a lot of her dialogue, complete with the Ratnagiri twang.
Filmmaker: And Kani Kusruti and Divya Prabha?
Kapadia: I knew their work. I’ve been wanting to cast Kani in this film since the very beginning. I used to keep sending her drafts of the script. I knew I wanted to work with people who have the similar political bent as me. Both Divya and Kani are very politically aware people. I had seen Divya in this movie in Locarno called Ariyippu by Mahesh Narayanan. She’s really good in it, but she plays a very serious, older person. I thought “Maybe I’ll cast her as Prabha.” Then she came to meet me.
Filmmaker: In an audition?
Kapadia: If I’m keen to cast somebody, I ask them to come and stay with me for two days. We hang out and just see how it’s working out, because it’s really like building a relationship. So, Divya came, got off the train, and had this spunk in her walk. I was like, “This is Anu.”
Filmmaker: Speaking of relationships, your partner Ranabir Das is the cinematographer and producer of the film. His brother Topshe does the music. What’s that working relationship like?
Kapadia: Ranabir and I are obsessed with cinema. We love to talk about film and watch films together and explore cinematic ideas. For me, this is the greatest thing about my life: We started working together when we were in FTII, we learned cinema together and discovered films together, we grew together, and I think that’s what makes us get along.
Topshe had done a little music for A Night of Knowing Nothing. I’m quite nerdy when it comes to filmmaking. I like to work a lot in the pre-production phase, I like to do a lot of tryouts. I like to shoot scenes, edit those. I like to do sound design. I’m a very process-driven person, so I like to work with people open to that. Topshe was somebody who was making a lot of music for me and sending it to me based on the script. I didn’t use a lot of music, but he was open to doing tryouts. He is obviously very talented, but he was also willing to go along with this process. He was really generous, but so was everyone. The actors worked really long before the film even took off, we were not paying them back then. It was so nice to see everybody coming together to make a movie.
Filmmaker: What’s your writing process like?
Kapadia: I write each scene 15, sometimes 20 times. If it’s still not working, I will rewrite it. So, I have a lot of drafts and write a lot of backstory. I write letters from one character to the other. I write about dreams that they had. I actually quite like it. Ranabir always makes fun of me saying if I have to get from point A to point B, I am not able to do it. But if I’m just allowing myself to drift, I have really great ideas.
He and my producer, Thomas Hakim, are both good producers. A good producer will help you organize your thoughts. We really need good creative producers who tell us when we have lost our way. Thomas will say, “I remember you told me this three years ago. You were really passionate about it. Now finish it.” I’ll be like “Okay, I’ll do it.” I’m a bit like a schoolgirl. I have to be scolded by people from time to time.
The only way to make films is to stick to one thing, because you can very easily flip when something’s not working, then just move on to something else. But the way for me is to go again, again, again. Sometimes I just want to pull out my hair and say, “I can’t do it anymore. I’ve done 30 drafts.” But then I’ll go out and see something, then I’m like, “Okay, maybe I can think of it this way instead.” It’s a tiring and long process, but I really love writing.
Filmmaker: When you won the Grand Prix at Cannes, people in India made fake X profiles of you. Some of these thanked the Prime Minister and some thanked the leader of the opposition. What was that like?
Kapadia: I was very hassled by the fake profiles; it was really obnoxious. I had to put out a statement saying that this was misinformation. That was important to me. But now that I look back at it, I feel like it was just a short wave and it passed. Now nobody cares anymore. I just hope they go watch my movie when it releases.
Filmmaker: Did your last film see a wide release in India?
Kapadia: No, but it showed a lot in universities. I gave it to every cine club that wanted to show it. Some people put up a bedsheet and projected the film on it. We did a limited pre-release of All We Imagine As Light in the state of Kerala and it was almost a full house.
Filmmaker: You have spoken about the dire funding landscape in India. Can you tell me a bit about it?
Kapadia: There are no funds. It’s really sad. We used to have funds before. Also, if you went to FTII, in your final year you could submit a script to the National Film Development Corporation and they could pick it up. There was some kind of long-term plan for film students. Now you don’t know what to do after you graduate as a director. Doordarshan [the public television channel] would sometimes buy the movie, so you could recover a lot of the cost. There’s no such network in place anymore. Firstly, there’s no money to make films. Then, once you’ve somehow managed to make one, there’s no way to distribute it. It’s a really sad situation. In a state like Kerala, there are state-funded theaters. Not enough, but it’s there at least.
In America, which is a studio driven and capitalistic and commercial market, there are still avenues for independent filmmakers. At least there are spaces for people to meet: festivals, residencies, grants, labs. In India, the Telugu film industry doesn’t know what the Assamese industry is doing. If there was some kind of space where we were all interacting and sharing our experiences, knowledge, and opportunities, I think it would really help.
Filmmaker: You are on this year’s Time 100 Next list. Ayushman Khurrana, the actor, wrote “India is a young country of more than 1.4 billion people. We have 1.4 billion stories to tell, and Payal has boldly, loudly, and brilliantly told everyone to pursue their dreams.” What is the weight of something like that?
Kapadia: I don’t know. I think when you have a film, you’re on a ride, then you go back into anonymity, sitting in your room writing your film. Then you come out of again; you’re like, “Hello. Please see my film.” And no one remembers you.
Filmmaker: No, that’s not true for you.
Kapadia: I just think that independent filmmaking is about riding these waves of interest then completely disappearing in your dark room and writing. So, I just take it with a pinch of salt.
Filmmaker: And do you feel pressured for a Cannes hat trick?
Kapadia: Whenever I start making a film, it’s really like an academic exercise. We never really think that the film will go here or go there, or we make it for this. I think it was Kurosawa who said that filmmaking is like climbing a mountain: You don’t look at the peak but just at your feet, otherwise you’ll go mad. I think of it like that. Three, four years ago, I had given up on this film. It took so long to get any funding. It’s a precarious industry. Suddenly, one day you have money. Other times, you wait years to get it. I just feel happy that I can make these films.
