The delightful days and sleepless nights that went into Payal Kapadia’s ‘All We Imagine As Light’
‘Scroll’ spoke to the Film and Television Institute of India-trained director on her historic win at the Cannes Film Festival.
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From faraway Paris, the celebrations in India that have followed Payal Kapadia’s historic win at the Cannes Film Festival for All We Imagine As Light can only appear somewhat bewildering.
“It feels very weird,” said Kapadia, who has stayed on in the French capital to fix the film’s sound design and music. “All this scrutiny is not my style.”
On May 25, 38-year-old Kapadia’s debut feature won Cannes’s second- highest award, the Grand Prix. She is the first Indian to receive this honour.
All We Imagine As Light revolves around two Malayali nurses working in a hospital in Mumbai. Prabha (Kani Kusruti), who has a troubled marriage, gets involved in the housing woes of the hospital cook Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam). Anu (Divya Prabha) embarks on a relationship with a Muslim man (Hridhu Haroon).
Kapadia and her team spent the weeks before the May 23 premiere frantically completing the movie. The closing ceremony on May 25 was followed by an after-party that involved dancing and encounters with filmmakers Kapadia admired, from Miguel Gomes, who also won an award at Cannes, to Hirokazu Koreeda, who was part of the jury that gave her the Grand Prix.
“Exhaustion has now set in,” Kapadia told Scroll. “We have been sleeping a lot.”
A week is a long time in the life of...
