From Cannes to Golden Globes: Payal Kapadia’s glorious journey portraying sisterhood in cinema | Exclusive

Payal Kapadia had once mentioned that the biggest difference between Indie and main stream cinema is that budget often dictates the storytelling style. Truly, Indian cinema on sisterhood is having its moment. All We Imagine As Light talks about women’s desires and friendship in a city where people like to stay aloof.

Payal Kapadia’s film All We Imagine As Light has looked at the maximum city through women’s lens. How women’s sexual desire is as important as emotional desire. Three women colleagues, Prabha (Kani Kusruti), Anu (Divya Prabha), and Parvathy (Chhaya Kadam) who work as nurses in the hospital come together. It follows the life of Prabha (Kani Kusruti), a Mumbai nurse whose life is thrown in disarray when she receives a rice cooker from her estranged husband. The film talks about unspoken desires.

Earlier this year, her film gained global recognition at Canes film festival 2024. In an exclusive interview with Firstpost, the director of this gem, Payal Kapadia, poured her heart out and spoke about the city of Mumbai, the challenges of making independent cinema, the characters she has written for this film, and what we can expect next from her.

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On raising money for the film _All We Imagine As Light_

She made this film trying to raise money, which was from government grants. Kpadia said, “As I wanted some freedom as to what I wanted to do in the film and not have any baggage of, like, the box office. So in order to do that, I had to find co-producers from all over the world and in India also. And so that process takes time and in the middle I made another film. It’s called A Night Of Knowing Nothing. After that film was done, I had the funding.”

From 2022 onwards, she started working on this film. “I shot in 2023, and it’s out by 2024. It was more than raising the funding beforehand that took time.”

On Payal Kapadia’s film

The film, which scripted history by becoming the first Indian movie to win the Grand Prix award at the Cannes in May, has been registering wins and nominations as Hollywood gears up for its annual awards season that culminates with Oscars.

At the Golden Globes, “All We Imagine As Light” will compete with “Emilia Perez” (France), “The Girl With the Needle” (Poland), “I’m Still Here” (Brazil), “The Seed of the Sacred Fig (US) and the “Vermiglio” (Italy) in the Best Non-English Language Motion Picture category.

On choosing Mumbai as the city in her film, she said, “I’m from Mumbai, and I think it’s a city that I know best. That’s why I felt comfortable talking about it. And, I think that it’s a city which has a lot of contradictions. And one of them I felt strongly about is that it gives us as women a lot of opportunities, and it’s a little bit easier to work. And there’s a kind of professionalism that I think still there’s a long way to go. But compared to a lot of other places in our country, Mumbai is a little bit easier for women to think about working in.”