All We Imagine as Light (Payal Kapadia, 2024).
The films of Payal Kapadia exist at the intersection between scorching injustices and reveries that transcend them. All of her works, four shorts and two features to date, are dotted with people struggling to connect and overcome systemic forces that keep them apart. Hers is a cinema of liberation, committed not simply to documenting acts of resistance, but to using the medium as a vehicle for change. Her debut feature, A Night of Knowing Nothing (2021), offers far more than a piercing look at the 2015 student strikes that swept across her alma mater, the Film and Television Institute of India. It manages to also harness the energies that pulsated from those crowds—an insider’s account that, through caliginous imagery and non-diegetic sounds, vividly captures the feeling of being one with the students fighting the appointment of a TV actor and right-wing politician as their university’s new chairman. Change, in Kapadia’s oeuvre, is indissolubly bound with dreams, which is to say with our capacity to reinvent and imagine the world anew.
So it is with her second feature, All We Imagine as Light (2024). The film unfurls as a diptych, finding three nurses living and working in Mumbai, and then following them over the course of one long and tumultuous day at a beachside village. Like its predecessor, which wove into footage of the FTII strikes a fictional romance that eventually succumbed to caste differences, this film too follows characters striving to forge bonds in a world where such connections are all but impossible. The youngest, twentysomething Anu (Divya Prabha), is dating a man she can’t be seen with: she’s Hindu, he’s Muslim. Her older colleague and flatmate, Prabha (Kani Kusruti), is only nominally married to a man who left for Germany years back, and whose ghostly presence now manifests itself through the occasional gifts he sends from abroad—including a scintillating rice cooker, which lands in Prabha’s hands as a space artifact from another galaxy. As for the eldest, Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam), some rapacious property developers are threatening to evict her from her home; once they succeed, the three nurses travel to her coastal hometown, where Parvaty is determined to start afresh, away from the city and its soul-numbing humdrum.
Everything about All We Imagine suggests impermanence and alienation. As shot by Kapadia’s regular cinematographer and partner, Ranabir Das, Mumbai isn’t portrayed as a collection of landmarks, but as a series of liminal spaces, like the local trains Prabha takes on her way to and back from work, the city gliding past her in a damp emulsion of cranes and construction sites. Sounds too heighten the film’s feeling of rootlessness; as it was in A Night of Knowing Nothing, the noises we hear caroming off the streets aren’t always tethered to the images they accompany, a choice that defamiliarizes the most unassuming experiences, opening up the frame to new meanings and possibilities. This is in keeping with Kapadia’s grand design. Ever since her very first short, Watermelon, Fish and Half Ghost (2014), her cinema has proved an elastic and permeable realm, open to all sorts of cross-pollinations of different media. Drawings, sketches, and paintings have routinely featured across her projects, collaged over the film itself. There are no such intrusions here, but Kapadia’s script still finds room for some poetry, as when a doctor hands Prabha a poem he’s written, a heart-rending attempt to commune in a city where such moments are few and far between. “My dreams are made of everyday things,” one line goes; it’s a line that serves as a Rosetta Stone for unlocking Kapadia’s universe, which celebrates the beauty and magic of the quotidian as a form of resistance.
A couple of days before All We Imagine as Light was awarded the Grand Prix at Cannes, I sat with Kapadia to discuss her film and creative process, a conversation we resumed over Zoom some weeks after her film’s historic triumph.
NOTEBOOK: I was hoping we could begin by talking about time—or rather, the different ways of experiencing it that you explore in the film. There’s a clear contrast in the way time unfolds in Mumbai and how it stretches out once your characters leave the city. It made me think of the distinction between emotional and labor time; how the way we long for or grieve over someone can’t be accounted for in terms of days, hours, or minutes.
PAYAL KAPADIA: That was something we thought about a lot. We wanted to highlight the differences between time as it’s felt in the city, at home, in your workplace—and also explore this notion of free time, and the emotional impact these different experiences might bear on how you think about yourself and your relationships. It was very important for us to heighten the sense that time in Mumbai is very quick and fleeting; you barely have any of it for yourself. Even on your day off, you're still cleaning the house and washing clothes… This is not a city that allows you much of that freedom. Which makes the nurses’ trip so significant. It’s not a happy moment—it's quite a tragic one, in fact—but leaving Mumbai grants them a completely different feeling of time. It’s their one free day. Away from the city, they can think and process things in a way they wouldn't ordinarily be allowed to do.
NOTEBOOK: How involved were you in the editing?
KAPADIA: I like to edit the film a bit by myself before I get an editor. I really enjoy being with the footage for a long time to try out different combinations. It helps me feel the material almost physically, and also helps me gain some clarity; the way I make films, whatever plan I may have laid out always goes out of the window once I start editing. We did that for two months, Ranabir [Das] and I, just to get a sense of what we shot, and what we could do with it. And once I had internalized the footage a little, we got Clément [Pinteaux] on board. After that it all went pretty fast, because he's just a really good editor. But this idea of playing with time, that was something I was really intrigued by. Working with different temporalities, or at least challenging myself to experiment with that, is an aspect of cinema that excites me a lot. But it was a big challenge. You can write all you like on paper, but when it comes to executing things, you start asking yourself, “Why did I come up with that?” If you take the film’s first part, which stretches across several days, the scenes’ structures aren’t so complicated. It’s mostly one or two shots each. But in the second, which is all just one long day, it’s completely different. The final scene itself is almost ten minutes long. Whenever I work on a film I never know where I’ll end up. I think the process of making one helps me learn and figure out the possibilities of the medium. And that’s something I have a lot of fun doing; if I knew exactly where a film will take me, it’d be a very boring one to make.
All We Imagine as Light (Payal Kapadia, 2024).
NOTEBOOK: I remember you describing your writing in A Night of Knowing Nothing as very organic: there was very little that was premeditated about the script, or the film itself. Was the process here as loose?
KAPADIA: Well, this being a fiction film, the process of making it ended up determining the final shape, in some ways. There was much more money involved this time, and a bigger crew—which requires you to set up a certain structure before you start, just because there are many more people depending on you and asking questions you should have answers to! [Laughs.] In the end, the process dictates the form. That’s why for this film I had to have a script and I stuck to it quite a bit. But I did shoot a lot of extra scenes that I felt would be interesting to have. And I think my previous nonfiction work helped me, too. I had broken up the shooting into two parts. Once the first was finished, I had a two-and-a-half-month break, which gave us enough time to edit it. It wasn’t a proper cut, of course. But like in nonfiction, you can go back, look at your footage, try a few things, and then go shoot again. Breaking it up really helped me navigate the second half. I tried to keep the documentary process there, somehow, all while navigating the fiction baggage.
NOTEBOOK: How does your writing unfurl, usually? Your approach to filmmaking strikes me as very porous; I’d love to hear more about the cross-pollination that might happen with other art forms.
KAPADIA: I don't really have a very structured process; I'm very chaotic in how I like to work. But I like to keep an editing timeline while I write. I might jot down something and then put it on the editing. I might find a painting, some music, animations, or I might come across somebody else's words. Sometimes I try to record them with my own voice and put them in, to make a sort of sound design with that, just to see what it feels like. It’s sort of like making sketches, but with sound and text, and then I write scenes in the film. Sometimes it’s just meeting people, or taking small videos on my phone when I travel; I look back at them to see how somebody enters a frame, and how that movement might feel with a certain lens. These are things I always do. And I guess that’s the privilege of working in this medium: everything becomes more interesting, and life just gives you a lot more.
NOTEBOOK: Could you speak about the poem the doctor writes and gifts to Prabha? It’s one thing to write a script, but I imagine it must be a completely different one to write some poetry to fit the story.
KAPADIA: To be honest, the poem wasn’t supposed to be a very good one! The man’s not exactly the best poet…
NOTEBOOK: But it works! I thought some verses dovetailed with the film’s focus on small, quotidian details.
KAPADIA: It works in the context, maybe. Personally, I love writing lyrics. Except nobody ever wants to make them into songs. And I really enjoy writing random poetry, which may not be very good all the time. That's kind of what this was. I think all the Malayalis will tell you the guy's poetry is the reason why she dumped him… [Laughs.]
NOTEBOOK: It’s not the first time you’ve brought poetry or letters into your films. I was reminded of a line that’s whispered at the end of your 2018 short, And What Is the Summer Saying?, when a boy tells another he wrote a letter to a girl, “And she said yes; that’s what I called direct love—there is no other kind.” What draws you to all these different media?
KAPADIA: I think that too comes from the process of making a film. I think about filmmaking as like stitching a quilt together or knitting something; you find a little sparkly thing and you sew it in, and everything fits. That to me is what makes cinema such an incredible medium. It's like this little magic box that I can stuff with different ingredients, and see how it all cooks. I'm like a magpie who picks little things here and there.
NOTEBOOK: I thought the poem also made for an interesting contrast with the text messages Anu exchanges with her boyfriend, Shiaz [Hridhu Haroon]. It’s always fascinating to see filmmakers try to incorporate present-day technologies into their films, especially when these have such a bearing on their aesthetic. What informed your conversations with your cinematographer?
KAPADIA: Ranabir and I talked a lot about this too. I fear that sometimes I might be a little too anachronistic, too nostalgic… And I was keen to have other, more present-day features in the film. I think things like WhatsApp and text messages are a kind of secret life. Everyone looks down at their phone from time to time, and sometimes you may catch a little smile on someone’s face, and you wonder what they read that triggered it. I’m very romantic, so I like to think that all these airwaves around us are passing love messages that are traveling everywhere, floating in the sky, and we’re just in the middle of them. The idea made me happy, so I put it in. I’d like to use more technology in my future projects, like TikTok videos and the like. They’re such an essential part of our lives; why would we not acknowledge them?
All We Imagine as Light (Payal Kapadia, 2024).
NOTEBOOK: I wanted to talk about another piece of technology: the rice cooker. The way your film conjures it, it almost feels like some alien artifact.
KAPADIA: Well, everything is many things at once, and so it is for the rice cooker. I was very taken by this object, which is meant to serve as a thing of comfort for Prabha—but it is also a sign of domesticity, the kind of stuff you might receive in your dowry. There were all sorts of connotations to this appliance that I thought worked well to talk about this family life, this estranged husband-and-wife relationship. There’s also a capitalist dimension to it, of course; it’s sold to you as if it were the best thing in the world, so much so that it almost emanates a kind of sensuality. But at the same time it suggests so many other complex issues that Prabha is wrestling with. There was also this idea of the rice cooker serving as a kind of genie’s lamp: you rub it, steam comes out, and with it the husband. The suggestion that the most unassuming things can be so much more than what they seem excites me a lot. I had recently read a lot of short stories that use small objects to talk about an entire relationship, very subtly, and that was something I wanted to experiment with.
NOTEBOOK: Can I ask you which short stories you’d been reading?
KAPADIA: One was “The Pomegranate,” by Yasunari Kawabata. It’s from his collection of short stories called “Palm-of-the-Hand Stories,” and it’s about…well, a pomegranate, but so many other things, too. There was also a text by an Indian painter, Bhupen Khakhar, who wrote a story called “Phoren Soap”—phoren as in foreign. It’s set at a time when India was a socialist country and there was no way of getting some products from abroad. We didn’t have Coca-Cola, for instance; soap-wise, you would only have three types. And the story is about this man who somehow obtains this foreign soap tablet and how that becomes a whole thing. I was interested in these tiny, quotidian objects—the way they can both be banal and still very sensual. And there was also an artwork I really liked, from an artist couple based in South Korea that work under the name Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries; they work with Adobe Flash animations that are synched to jazzy tracks. It’s a mix of text and music, and they made a clip called Samsung Means to Come [2000], which really blew my mind, and also spoke about the nexus between house appliances and desire.
NOTEBOOK: Speaking of genies and apparitions, I was hoping we could address one of your leitmotifs: dreams. All your films teem with them—and sometimes seem to unfurl as reveries themselves. How do you explain this interest?
KAPADIA: There’s a simple reason for that. My father was a psychoanalyst, and growing up we spoke a lot about dreams. They were very much part of our lives, and were treated as actual experiences. They were never shunned as irrelevant; they were as important as anything else. Growing up, it was just normal for my sister and I to talk about our dreams with our father. I also think that in our culture there’s a lot of cross-connections between dreams and beliefs. We are a society that unfortunately has a lot of beliefs; I say unfortunately because I think some of that is quite problematic, but they’re a part of our lives. To some degree, these things carry more meaning than hard facts; they’re a way to express feelings you may not be able to normally talk about or may not even understand. I like to use them as a cinematic tool.
NOTEBOOK: And yet even when dreams do make their way into your films, they never really break them, so to speak. By the time Prabha’s husband magically shows up, All We Imagine as Light has moved to a place where such an event isn’t a reverie but something much more tangible, almost believable.
KAPADIA: I guess that too has to do with my upbringing. The story you hear at the beginning, when an old patient at the hospital tells the nurses she’s seeing the ghost of her late husband, is from my grandmother, who genuinely believed her husband was still around her. Maybe it’s because growing up there was never something or someone who would point out to me what was a dream, what was fantasy. It was all just part of everyday life, like having a plant in your house. And I was also drawn to the idea of bringing in a contemporary folktale. A lot of Indian women’s tales, especially from the Western coast, where I’m from, revolve around these projections onto the male world: the man can be anything from a ghost to an animal to a tree, and it’s up to the woman to get him back. These manifestations of the other then become a way for them to deal with life and their anxieties. I find it interesting that folktales can sort of calm your beating heart.
All We Imagine as Light (Payal Kapadia, 2024).
NOTEBOOK: I’d love to hear more about the way you shot the city. All we see of Mumbai are liminal spaces: train carriages, hospital halls, bustling markets. You purposely elide any instantly identifiable landmarks; it’s a choice that seems to heighten the feeling of rootlessness the film radiates.
KAPADIA: We wanted to shoot parts of the city as you might see them from a train on your way to work. That’s the place where you get to see most of Mumbai when your job is somewhere far from where you live, as it is for these characters. The train is where you end up spending a lot of your time, and for us, it's a very big part of living in the city. Everybody needs to take it. That, if anything, was the real landmark: Mumbai’s local trains. Even when you might not see them, they’re always part of the city’s soundscapes.
NOTEBOOK: Since you mentioned sounds, I was really intrigued by the aural and visual dissonances you played with here. As it was for A Night of Knowing Nothing, the sounds that ricochet from some of the film’s frames do not always match the images. What intrigues you about these frictions?
KAPADIA: I think these juxtapositions of sounds and images help me create a feeling rather than parcel out information. They might not necessarily be illustrations of each other, but perhaps their contrast might elicit some other meaning in the mind of the viewer. And there’s a lot of possibility in that, because these clashes might challenge the way you usually think about things. And I like the gap that emerges because of that. Sometimes the sound is diegetic, and echoes from the space you’re in; other times it’s not. Cinema makes these things possible.
NOTEBOOK: It’s a decision that also magnifies this omnipresent feeling of impermanence: nothing here is ever stable, or fixed. Not even sounds.
KAPADIA: Yeah. I also think the human mind accepts a lot while watching films. There is something in our brain that seems to constantly strive toward meaning. If you throw different things into the pot, you can rely on sounds to guide your mind to think about visuals in different ways.
NOTEBOOK: Could you speak about the score? I was interested in hearing more about the piano pieces you picked and, more broadly, what the rationale behind the music was.
KAPADIA: The piano score you mention is by an Ethiopian pianist, Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou, who passed away just last year. When I was cutting the film, my editor introduced me to her work. And as soon as I heard it I knew it would fit very well; her music spoke to the feelings of delight and reverie that both the couple and the two younger nurses get to experience. There was something that really struck me about it. The other music is by Topshe, an Indian musician. I really like his craft, and we got to work very closely for a whole year. Finding and working on the music for this film took a long time. In my previous projects I would often use anything I could find—I’d look for songs online, sometimes on Freesound, but the quality wasn’t always so good. In the end it’s all about staying true to the kind of feeling you want to transpire from this or that scene.
All We Imagine as Light (Payal Kapadia, 2024).
NOTEBOOK: I wanted to go back to the film’s sensuality and its focus on bodies. You pay so much attention to the way your characters caress, touch, make out; I was wondering if you could speak about this corporeal dimension of your cinema. Bodies were also paramount in A Night of Knowing Nothing…
KAPADIA: Yes, but there they were part of a collective: people protesting, dancing, a lot of bodies together in the same space. That was the sense of unity we’d tried to capture. Whereas here, there’s a lot more isolation between characters. Even though the two nurses live in such a crammed space, you never really think of them as close. They keep lying to each other; they share the same room, yet feel so distant, as if they belonged to different solar systems. Only after they reach the countryside are they finally forced to confront each other. That’s when we started framing Anu and Prabha together more and more. In the first half, the shots can feel a little more tableaux-like, and the camera keeps a certain distance from them. In the second, they’re a lot closer, and we move a lot more with their bodies, because there’s a difference in the way we feel time over there, the sensuality of the place, their being together. We thought the camera should heighten all of that, and almost touch them with the lens.
NOTEBOOK: Could you tell me more about your casting? How and where did you meet your lead actresses, and what is it they possessed that made you think they’d be perfect for the roles?
KAPADIA: The casting took some time. Which was all on me; at the beginning I wasn’t so sure of what I wanted. I first started writing the script in 2018. Back then, I wanted to cast the actress who plays Prabha, Kani [Kusruti], to play Anu. She was much younger, and she had acted in a short film called Memories of a Machine [2016], where I thought she was extremely good. But as time went by and we both grew older, I wondered if she might play Prabha instead. She’s a great actress—very expressive and very playful; I’ve seen her playing a lot of interesting and versatile roles over the past few years. She comes from a theater background, and we did lots of rehearsals, as if we were working on a play. To be honest, at first I didn’t think that the character of Prabha would be so severe, but Kani has that quality in her, too—and she can also come across as a little silly, a little awkward and goofy, which I really like, and which I thought suited her character well.
As for Divya [Prabha], she often gets to play characters that are much older than she is. She recently starred in Declaration [2022], which premiered in Locarno, in which she played this very serious woman, and I thought she was just brilliant. I was convinced she was a much older person, just because she nailed the part so well. But when we finally met up, she was the opposite: an excitable, young, social media–savvy woman. She told me she was tired of being cast for these older roles, she just wanted to be herself. It felt perfect. Whereas Chhaya [Kadam], she’s a very well-known actress in India with a huge body of work. I’d seen her performance in Fandry [2013] many years ago, and it stayed with me since. She was just so good. Again, at first I’d imagined someone much older for the role of Parvaty, but because Chhaya comes from a village in the same district where the three nurses end up in the film’s second part, she really knew the area and its dialect. She knew how a local woman would speak Hindi, and she also had family who’d worked in the mills, and had eventually made the journey to Mumbai. Nobody would have understood the part better than her.
NOTEBOOK: How collaborative is your approach to directing actors? Do you leave room for the unexpected on set, or do you have a very strict idea as to how the script will unfurl, and the marks they’ll have to hit?
KAPADIA: There was a lot of prep work before the shooting. We lived together for almost a month, just trying out stuff. We shot a lot of things with a small camera; we’d watch the footage, see what worked. Suppose there were scenes with Anu and Prabha; we’d try all of those out, then do a bunch of others—scenes that wouldn’t even be in the film, or the script, just for fun. This is what I mean when I say it was a bit like a theater performance. As in theater, actors contributed a lot physically, and these three ladies really understood their characters because they got to spend a long time thinking about them. And they brought a lot into the process: the dialect, the slang each of them would use, which English words, how and when they would say them. All these things were meticulously thought about, because I don't speak Malayalam, and I obviously cannot direct a film if I don’t understand what's going on. So the workshops were a learning process for me, too, and some of the impromptu stuff that was said during those rehearsals made it into the script; sometimes the three of them said things that sounded a lot better than what I’d originally written. The ideas were the same, but the way they’d articulate them was so much more interesting and natural. I'm really grateful they were so giving and generous. Which meant that when we went on set, we already knew what we wanted. Sometimes we would even watch the rehearsals the night before, just to refresh our memories as to what we liked and worked.
All We Imagine as Light (Payal Kapadia, 2024).
NOTEBOOK: You found the title of your previous film very serendipitously: it was a line that you saw scribbled on a wall at your university. Where did this come from?
KAPADIA: My mum is a painter, and All We Imagine as Light is the title she gave to a painting she made a few years ago. I can’t remember where she got it from, but it just stayed with me, and she let me borrow it! [Laughs.] The film’s about not being able to see a way out when one is surrounded by darkness, and that was the idea I wanted to highlight—that hope doesn’t exist if you have never seen it.
NOTEBOOK: I completely understand if you’d rather not answer this last question, but I was wondering how you felt about some of the responses you received after winning the Grand Prix in Cannes. I know I’m not the only one who found it somewhat ironic (to put it kindly) that your alma mater should celebrate your success after persecuting you for participating in the very strikes you documented in A Night of Knowing Nothing.
KAPADIA: To be honest, I think the award gave me a chance to talk about the reasons we went on the strike in the first place. Public institutions like my film school should remain the way they are, and give students the freedom to make the films they want to make with the financial support they should receive. So all in all, it worked out well; people were listening, and I could talk about these things, which really helped to reiterate what a place like FTII means. That’s what our strike was about. And it’s not just the FTII; many other public institutions are under threat now in our country, because the fees are being hiked up all the time, while the public discourse keeps questioning their role. What are these public institutions doing? Why is our tax money going into them? Why should we be sponsoring these people, if they don't do anything for the country? To be able to rupture these polemics made me happy. And it wasn’t just me—there were other FTII alumni who screened their works and won prizes. Chidananda S Naik received the La Cinef award for best short; my classmate [Maisam Ali] had a film in the ACID sidebar. [Cinematographer Santosh Sivan also picked up the Pierre Angénieux tribute. –Ed.] They've been saying they want to shut these public institutions down or make them semi-private; we all added to the argument against that. And I'm really grateful for it. I know more films will be made and more books will be written by students of the FTII and other universities, like the JNU [Jawaharlal Nehru University], or the HCU [University of Hyderabad], whose fabric they’ve been trying so hard to destroy.
Read all of our Cannes 2024 coverage here.