"It's a Mumbai film", says Payal Kapadia about her Grand Prix winner "All We Imagine As Light" in which the city is almost a character with all its complications, its layers and the many millions who make it their home.
Mumbai is also the city where Kapadia spent her formative years. And the love, in all its complexities, comes through in the film about three women, all from outside Mumbai, who come to the city to make their living. "All We Imagine As Light" scripted history by becoming the first film from India to win the Grand Prix award at the Cannes Film Festival this May. After its theatrical run in France, Italy and in select cinemas in Kerala, it is all set to release across India on November 22. Kapadia borrowed the title from her painter mother Nalini Malani's work.
"It's a Mumbai film and about the lives of people who make Mumbai their home. The complications of the city, which we love but is also so difficult to live in... I wanted that feeling for the film that it could be the story of anybody from Mumbai who's come from outside," she told PTI.
The Malayalam-Hindi feature revolves around Prabha, a Mumbai nurse whose life is thrown in disarray when she receives a rice cooker from her estranged husband. Anu, her roommate and colleague, is struggling to find a private spot in the bustling city to be with her boyfriend. Prabha's best friend Parvati (Kadam), a widow, is being forced out of her home by property developers.
According to the director, there is a kind of frustration for a woman working and living in a city like Mumbai, where one can be financially independent but still find many things in which she has no choice.
"They are living by themselves but it's still so complicated to just be living your life in Mumbai or anywhere in the country." Kapadia said she started thinking about the story in 2018, a period when she was in and out of hospitals while tending to two close family members. That's how Prabha, the protagonist of her film, played by Kani Kusruti, came to be.
"I felt that the nursing profession is interesting because as nurses you can't show your emotion in your workspace. You have to be quick and precise and there's a kind of rigour in that job. But what if I had a character who has this kind of rigour, who is fully in the uniform, but inside there is this whole conflict and turmoil? This was something that I started thinking about." The local trains are an important character in the film as are the skyscrapers of Mumbai -- from Lower Parel to the suburbs. This, she said, not only helped her give a sense of the architecture of the city but also "the financial architecture" of the place.
"I wanted to have this contrast of moving through the city and the different feelings that it has, and who has accessibility to these buildings, and that was the concern for me because we know that the area used to be cotton mills, there were biggest housing chawls, which are now being replaced by these buildings. So, it was a kind of reference I wanted to have, at least, for Mumbaikars to remember what was there before." The film's theme of light and dark blends in with the way Mumbai, also eulogised in many songs as the city that never sleeps, becomes accessible to working people at night.
"I feel like nights in Mumbai become the time when we can explore the city, because we are not at work. So that’s the time you can go out, or go to eat kebab or pav bhaji. We know the city through the yellow lights that are lighting up our streets. There’s a feeling to that light, the neon lights of hoardings and we are a city which has a lot of night light more than a lot of cities in India. So I felt it was a characteristic of Mumbai." Kapadia, who studied at St. Xavier's College and Sophia College before studying film direction at the Film and Television Institute of India, is excited her film is opening the Mumbai MAMI Film Festival on Friday.
"When I was making this film, I wasn't sure... it's a precarious landscape for independent filmmakers, unsure of whether they will get distribution or not, or what will happen to their film. But now my film is getting released. I'm excited about it opening the MAMI festival because it's a festival I love and grew up watching," Kapadia said.
Though Kapadia's film was in the list of contenders, Kiran Rao's "Laapataa Ladies" was picked as India's entry to the Oscars in the international film category by the Film Federation of India. Kapadia, whose documentary "A Night of Knowing Nothing" also won an award in Cannes in 2021, is happy for Rao. And Rao, who made her directorial debut with "Dhobi Ghat" in 2010, said in an interview with AFP that she was hoping "All We Imagine As Light" gets nominated in the best picture category.
"I like her (Rao's) work a lot. I’m a huge fan of 'Dhobi Ghat’. It's also a Mumbai film, right, and a Mumbai film that doesn't look at the iconic places of Mumbai but normalises the streets of Mumbai... I also loved ‘Laapataa Ladies’. I’m happy that it is an India entry." Asked whether she was looking at submitting the film for consideration in general categories the way "RRR" did, Kapadia said for now she is just focused on the film's US release. She is happy a mainstream producer like Rana Daggubati has backed the India distribution of an independent film like hers.
"We all need each other... And to get support from very big filmmakers and producers, even from Rana (Daggubati) to distribute the film, that’s nice. We need to think of our whole industry and everybody in it."