Some emerge through voiceover or intertitles. Others unfold before the camera: held high on banners at protests, or illuminated by torchlight in caves. All through Payal Kapadia’s impassioned, lyrical cinema, different kinds of love letters open up. Whether they speak of solidarity, romance, or cinephilia, their words collectively echo the Mumbaikar filmmaker’s own ardent commitment to freedoms often threatened in contemporary India. Kapadia’s is a humanist vision, with international resonance. She has made only two features, and both were laurelled at Cannes.
Kapadia’s documentary debut, A Night of Knowing Nothing (2021), blossoms from correspondence she uncovered at film school, languishing in an abandoned box with news cuttings and dried flowers. Starting from epistolary lines written by an anonymous student to her faraway boyfriend, Kapadia soon widens her frame and narrates the unrest that shook Indian universities while Narendra Modi rose to power. Moving from a private world to the public sphere like this is characteristic of Kapadia’s dexterity, as is the way she mixes urgent video footage of street scenes and rallies with contemplative, shimmering tableaux shot on film. Embracing both the oblique and direct possibilities of cinema, she has become one of a few twenty-first-century visionaries who have defined anew what nonfiction can be.
All We Imagine as Light (2024) is a page-turn to fiction, but Kapadia still has a hold on the world. Before tracing the stories of two nurses in Mumbai, the writer-director begins with traveling shots of the Maximum City. From there, she continually immerses us in place through textures, sounds, smells. Kapadia’s images are colored with an intimate understanding of pleasure—sensuous pinks, serene blues, an onion’s jewel-like purple—and her unshrinking narrative is too. Transcending bias, desire ripples through this film: It flows, as one declaration of love scrawled on a cave wall puts it, “like the endless sea.”

Some emerge through voiceover or intertitles. Others unfold before the camera: held high on banners at protests, or illuminated by torchlight in caves. All through Payal Kapadia&#8217;s impassioned, lyrical cinema, different kinds of love letters open up. Whether they speak of solidarity, romance, or cinephilia, their words collectively echo the Mumbaikar filmmaker&#8217;s own ardent commitment to freedoms often threatened in contemporary India. Kapadia&#8217;s is a humanist vision, with international resonance. She has made only two features, and both were laurelled at Cannes.
Kapadia&#8217;s documentary debut, A Night of Knowing Nothing (2021), blossoms from correspondence she uncovered at film school, languishing in an abandoned box with news cuttings and dried flowers. Starting from epistolary lines written by an anonymous student to her faraway boyfriend, Kapadia soon widens her frame and narrates the unrest that shook Indian universities while Narendra Modi rose to power. Moving from a private world to the public sphere like this is characteristic of Kapadia&#8217;s dexterity, as is the way she mixes urgent video footage of street scenes and rallies with contemplative, shimmering tableaux shot on film. Embracing both the oblique and direct possibilities of cinema, she has become one of a few twenty-first-century visionaries who have defined anew what nonfiction can be.
All We Imagine as Light (2024) is a page-turn to fiction, but Kapadia still has a hold on the world. Before tracing the stories of two nurses in Mumbai, the writer-director begins with traveling shots of the Maximum City. From there, she continually immerses us in place through textures, sounds, smells. Kapadia&#8217;s images are colored with an intimate understanding of pleasure&#8212;sensuous pinks, serene blues, an onion&#8217;s jewel-like purple&#8212;and her unshrinking narrative is too. Transcending bias, desire ripples through this film: It flows, as one declaration of love scrawled on a cave wall puts it, &#8220;like the endless sea.&#8221;

Love Letters: Films by Payal Kapadia

LOVE LETTERS: FILMS BY PAYAL KAPADIA

Whether they speak ardently of solidarity, romance, or cinephilia, love letters unfold all across Payal Kapadia’s impassioned films. Marking the welcome emergence of a new voice in global cinema, these two Cannes prizewinners embrace precious freedoms often under threat in contemporary India.

Whether they speak ardently of solidarity, romance, or cinephilia, love letters unfold all across Payal Kapadia&#8217;s impassioned films. Marking the welcome emergence of a new voice in global cinema, these two Cannes prizewinners embrace precious freedoms often under threat in contemporary India.