All We Imagine as Light writer/director Payal Kapadia talks to Screen about her her Mumbai-set scripted feature debut.
Payal Kapadia has had a whirlwind year. It began with a series of firsts: her fiction debut All We Imagine As Light was the first Indian film to play in Competition at Cannes in 30 years, and saw Kapadia become the first Indian female director to win the grand prix. Then came a slew of awards at festivals around the world, topped off by nominations for best director and non-English language picture at the Golden Globes, and being named best international film by both New York and Los Angeles critics groups. Kapadia was also named one of Time Magazine’s 100 most influential people of the year.
So while her film was not submitted to the Academy’s international feature category by her home country, Kapadia shrugs it off with a game chuckle. “I got a lot more than I expected from my film so everything else is a super bonus,” she says. “I’m really happy that it’s being shown in 50 countries, even India — that’s a privilege.”
Despite the Oscar snub, All We Imagine As Light is scoring with audiences, having grossed $2.3m worldwide at press time after releasing in several territories including the UK (through BFI) and the US (Sideshow Releasing/Janus Films). A delicate tale of three women — two nurses and a hospital cook — living and working in Mumbai, the film combines striking visuals, poignant character development and a hint of magical realism against a portrayal of a modern city in transition.
Kapadia began working on the film almost a decade ago, around the same time as she was putting together the Cannes l’Oeil d’Or winner A Night Of Knowing Nothing, her feature-length documentary debut about the 2015 student strikes at her alma mater, the Film and Television Institute of India. Kapadia collaborated with French producers Petit Chaos on that film and, following her participation in the Cinefondation residency in Paris, began working on All We Imagine As Light.
Petit Chaos produces with India’s Chalk & Cheese Films, the Netherlands’ BALDR Film and Luxembourg’s Les Films Fauves co-producing, and a financing jigsaw that includes national and European Union organisations. The only Indian finance came from tax credits. “We don’t have anything like the UK National Lottery in India,” says Kapadia, “so there are no funds in India to make independent films.”
Life moments
The story was inspired by the experiences of Kapadia’s friends and family. “I met a lot of nurses and one hadn’t heard from her husband for a long time, just like the main character in the film,” she says. “I was also thinking about my relationships with women who are older and younger than me and how my behaviour with them has changed over the years.”
The two nurses — Prabha, played by Kani Kusruti, and her younger roommate Anu, played by Divya Prabha — are from Kerala and speak mostly in Malayalam. “Yes, it does accentuate their outsiderness but it’s also because a big part of the culture of women in Kerala is to be nurses,” says Kapadia. “They are looked up to as being extremely good at their work, and I wanted to honour that. It was totally crazy to make a film in Malayalam, a language I don’t speak, but I thought, ‘Let’s go for it.’”
In a nod to Kapadia’s documentary background, the film begins with the camera moving through the city at night while, off-camera, migrant workers talk about living in Mumbai. The camera then alights on Prabha on her long commute home.
“I’ve always been interested in the hybrid cinema which lies between fiction and non-fiction,” says Kapadia. “The only difference between non-fiction and fiction is the process. The process of non-fiction is ever-evolving so you shoot a bit, you come back to look at the footage, you edit it, then you go back and rescript what you did. There is that flexibility.
“In fiction, you have a bound script and you have to stick to it otherwise it costs a lot of money,” she continues. “I tried to keep a bit of the non-fiction process in the film by having it in two parts. We had a two-month break in the middle before we moved the production to the coast for the second half of the story and I really thought about what I’d shot. It was primarily because we had to wait for the monsoon weather to clear but I used it to my advantage.”
Setting the scene
Lighting, colour and sound are key in portraying the cramped, teeming city, where the rain is forever pouring and the sound of the trains rattling along tracks is a constant refrain.
Kapadia worked closely with her cinematographer and producer Ranabir Das and her production designers Piyusha Chalke, Yashasvi Sabharwal and Shamim Khan to perfect the look of the film. “We would take a camera and roam around the city and discuss framing and images,” she says. “We looked at paintings, photographs, other films and sometimes we’d get our friends to walk around the city and shoot them.”
Shooting in Mumbai threw up several challenges. “Lots of films shoot in the city so it costs a lot to shoot there especially in popular streets, and our film was not big-budget,” says Kapadia. “The street where Anu and [her boyfriend] Shiaz eat kebabs is Mohammed Ali Road, which is famous for the food stalls and its outdoor culture. Recreating the street would have been too difficult and expensive. So we shot it with a DSLR [digital single-lens reflex] handheld camera and acted like tourists. It was just the two actors, the DoP and one production person. It was a very relaxed shoot — we’d film, stop and have a kebab, film, stop, film some more. The best way to shoot.”
When the three women travel to the coastal village south of Mumbai — after the cook, played by Chhaya Kadam, is evicted from her tenement home in the city — the lush countryside brings a magical sense of freedom. The film takes on a languorous, dreamlike tone, and includes first a sex scene between Anu and her boyfriend — which was cleared by India’s film censor — then culminates in a revelatory hallucination for Prabha.
“I wanted to go from a realistic, documentary-style start to something that was almost like a fable or dream,” explains Kapadia. “There are a lot of things that can’t be spoken by women, like your desire for a man, so it’s done through these folk tales where a husband returns to a woman in the shape of a dog or a tree or a ghost. Prabha can’t express her feelings, so I wanted something very internal, almost as though she’s purging her husband from her life.”
Next up for Kapadia is the second film in her planned trilogy about Mumbai, again focused on women but this time a mystery tale. “We see the gentrification that’s taking place in All We Imagine As Light and it’s completely changed the area of Lower Parel where Parvaty the cook lives,” explains Kapadia, regarding her continued fascination with the metropolis. “The city is changing so quickly that I need to document it as fast as I can.”
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