Payal Kapadia, director of All We Imagine is Light, sees a different way

NEW YORK—Fiction runs imperceptibly in Payal Kapadia’s films.

The Indian director’s first film, Knowing Nothing, is a documentary about the student strike at the Film and Television Institute of India, Kapadia’s alma mater, after Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s appointment as its right-wing head. However, the film has fictional letters between two students who are separated due to belonging to different castes.

Kapadi’s first full-length feature film, All We See as Light, begins more like a documentary, surveying Mumbai, especially at night, before gently gravitating towards three women, all hospital workers, juggling their everyday realities and realities life. Indian stratified society with its aspirations.

“Real life is more interesting than movies. All we have to do is reap its fruits,” says Kapadia with a smile. “There’s a quote from Rilke that I really like: ‘If your real life is poor, it means you’re not enough of a poet to draw from its riches.’

All We Imagine is Light, which opens in theaters Friday and expands in the coming weeks, is about as rich a movie you’ll see this year. The film, which received the Grand Prix (second prize) at the Cannes Film Festival, is an intoxicating and atmospheric portrait of life in Mumbai – its dreams, illusions and impossibilities.

As All We Imagine is Light, it slowly accumulates the magic of a fairy tale. Prabha (Kani Kusruti) has not heard from her husband, who is working in Germany, for years. Anu (Divya Prabha) is in love with a Muslim man, a relationship they have to hide and which is probably doomed. Their slightly older, recently widowed colleague Parvati (Chhaya Kadam) is being evicted after years in her apartment.

But when they escape the city—Parvati is forced to return to her village—the three women are freed from the various limitations that have gripped them. They begin to imagine possibilities and see the light hidden from them by the patriarchal inequality of Mumbai. “Everything We Imagine as Light,” which began as a documentary, becomes more and more fictional and at the same time truer.

“I wanted to get closer and closer to a dreamlike state towards the end of the film and then come back to reality,” says Kapadia. “I wanted the first part of the film to be very non-fiction, with a documentary beginning. And the second half to feel as if time is slowing down. The landscape changes and the feeling of light changes.”

The vivid phases of All We Imagine Like Light made it one of the most celebrated films of the year — and yet, curiously, India did not submit a Best International Film entry at the Oscars. Announcing their selection of Kiran Rao’s Laapataa Ladies, Ravi Kottarakara, president of the Film Federation of India, explained that the selection committee felt “that they were watching a European film set in India, not an Indian film set in India. .”

“What is an Indian? We have a very large continent. There are many Indias,” Kapadia said in a recent interview. “I am very pleased with the film they have chosen. It’s a really good movie. I really liked it. But I feel that such statements, I do not know what they serve. The selection committee consisted of 13 people. Is it very Indian? Then I don’t really mind.”

Kapadia, 38, met with a reporter at the Criterion Collection’s New York office during a screening of “All We Imagine as Light” at the New York Film Festival. Her bag was stuffed with DVDs from visits to the Criterion cabinet, including the Agnes Ward box set. Kapadia will naturally chatter about arthouse inspirations or social ills, but she’s bubbly, calm. The fact that her film evoked so much emotion (the press screening of the festival was rare when the audience burst into spontaneous applause at the end) is the most important thing for her.

“What more would you like as a director, for people to watch it, to like it and feel something while watching it?” says Kapadia. “As someone who likes to go to the movies and cry, this is the biggest catharsis I can get.” “I just feel like I want to make movies where people cry at the movies too.”

“I cry a lot. I am very light,” she adds. “I’m a bit of a romantic.”

Unlike her characters, Kapadia tries to find a different path as a director, operating outside the Bollywood studio system. At Cannes, where “All We See as Light” became the first Indian feature film to enter competition in 30 years, she argued that Indian cinema is broader than the bigger-budget films produced by state-owned industrial centers.

“Independent filmmakers all over the world, we’re just a sad bunch,” Kapadia says, laughing. “Everywhere we are weirdos. No one understands what we do. People say, “We can’t afford to see your movies in theaters.” What have you really been doing these five years?” This is a struggle for all independent filmmakers.”

Kapadia was born in Mumbai; her family had been there for generations. She attended school in southern India and was often fascinated by Mumbai as she commuted back and forth home.

“There is a sense of anonymity and freedom. It can be nice, she says. – But it is also a city with extreme inequality, which is increasing. Since the 80s, the absence of any social systems experiencing financial difficulties has become abhorrent. It’s a really brutal part of Bombay (formerly known as Mumbai), a disregard for life.”

As an example, she cites a scene at the beginning of All That We Imagine as Light, one of the documentary’s moments, in which masses of people try to board a train at the end of the workday. An announcement is heard urging people not to sit on top of the train, otherwise they will be electrocuted.

“How awful to make this announcement,” she says. “People would rather risk their lives to get home in time.”

Such pressures are not unique to Mumbai, Kapadia points out. You can find something similar in those who are used to living with capitalism, for example, wherever people struggle to realize that their circumstances don’t have to be what they’re told.

“It’s that we don’t know there’s another way,” Kapadia says. “We tend to work against ourselves when we don’t see that there is another way.”