‘All We Imagine As Light’ Director Payal Kapadia On Indie Filmmaking, Oscars Snub In Conversation With Hirokazu Kore-eda

Indian filmmaker Payal Kapadia, who was awarded the Grand Prix at this year’s Cannes film festival for her debut narrative feature All We Imagine As Light, talked about the challenges facing indie filmmakers in India during a conversation with Japanese auteur Hirokazu Kore-eda at Tokyo International Film Festival (TIFF). 

She also touched on how she felt about the fact that All We Imagine As Light was not selected by India’s Oscars committee as its submission for the Best International feature category, but was gracious about the snub. 

Kore-eda was on the Cannes competition jury that awarded Kapadia’s film, and said he was impressed by her, but due to the restraints of jury duty, had not been able to talk to her and find out more about her filmmaking career. The Japanese director is a Cannes regular, winning the Palme d’Or for Shoplifters in 2018, while Yuji Sakamoto won best screenplay at the festival for Kore-eda’s 2023 Monster.

After talking about the film school system in India, Kore-eda asked Kapadia why most graduates from filmmaking courses end up working in India’s mainstream film and TV industries. Kapadia replied: “It’s not easy to sustain a career in independent movies [in India]. People may have to go into the mainstream industry because there’s no support system, they have to start earning money, so they join the mainstream industry in Bollywood or the South.”

She added that India at one time provided funding for non-mainstream cinema through its national broadcaster, Doordarshan, but those support structures are no longer in place. She also explained that she started making her first feature-length film, documentary A Night Of Knowing Nothing (2021), which premiered in Directors Fortnight in Cannes, without any funding in place. 

“We just started shooting – we were protesting and so we were shooting,” said Kapadia about the film which explores university life in India including student protests. “Then we got the funding because we had French co-production. Now we always work with the French because they give money to make films, and France has a co-production treaty with India.” 

Kore-eda also quizzed Kapadia on how she decided to become a filmmaker and her time at the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII), India’s major national film school in Pune. She said her mother was an artist, which exposed her to the visual arts, but she rebelled and didn’t consider filmmaking as a career until she started watching films as an undergraduate at university. 

“We saw many short films from FTII, which were not narrative and were very free, and I felt this might be a nice place to go. I applied but didn’t get in, so worked for five years as an assistant director, which was miserable, but applied again and got through.”

She said FTII helped her a lot – she met her cinematographer, Ranabir Das, at the film school and enjoyed access to screenings at the nearby National Film Archive of India. This gave her exposure to films from around the world, and across different eras, including works by Kore-eda, as well as Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Edward Yang, Tsai Ming-liang, and classics from Japan’s Akira Kurosawa, and Indian auteurs Ritwik Ghatak and Satyajit Ray.

“Watching all those films helped me to think,” Kapadia said. “It was the kind of school where you could do a lot, or not do anything, it was very free. But I loved watching films and think that my love for cinema comes from being very excited to watch those movies.” 

She explained that All We Imagine As Light, about two women of different generations sharing a room in Mumbai, started in the same casual way as A Night Of Knowing Nothing, involving a collaborative working experience with her DoP.  “I was writing for two years, and for two years we would just go out in the monsoon and do some shooting. It was like a co-dependent, collaborative experience, and it was the same with the cast also.” 

As for that Oscars snub – India’s Oscars selection committee chose Kiran Rao’s Laapataa Ladies, while France shortlisted her film but eventually selected Emilia Perez as its Oscars submission – Kapadia said she was looking beyond it. “With this film, we got a lot already, so I’m very satisfied with how the journey of the film has turned out. It’s already much more than I expected. Anything that comes my way is more than I expected.” 

After winning the Cannes Grand Prix, the film has played in Busan, as the opening film at Mumbai Film Festival, and will be released theatrically in India by Rana Daggubati’s Spirit Media next month. Spirit Media has already given the film an Oscars-qualifying run in the state of Kerala. 

Kapadia said the film has been well received so far by Indian audiences, “but these were cinephile audiences. Now the film is in cinemas, I hope the wider audience likes it, because it raises questions that it’s good to raise in our country. 

“How these questions land is always complicated,” she continued. “But that doesn’t mean we should stop asking them and express feelings about the society we live in. After all, that’s our job and I hope people respond in way it’s intended.”