Payal Kapadia etched her name into the history of Indian cinema when she won the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival. Her Malayalam-Marathi-Hindi language film, ‘All We Imagine As Light’, beat stiff competition from such legendary directors as Francis Ford Coppola, Andrea Arnold, Mohammad Rasoulof, David Cronenberg and Jia Zhang-ke to land the coveted prize.
What does the Cannes festival’s Grand Prix mean to you and Indian cinema?
All the filmmakers who were in the competition were the ones whose films we used to watch at FTII. To see them and see them even watching our films was really too good. Being in the competition was victory itself. It was really a big bonus and privilege.
You shared the screen in Cannes this year with celebrated directors and became the first Indian to vie for the Palme d’Or in three decades?
Ours was not a very big film compared to the other films. We submitted it and didn’t think it would be selected for the competition section. I thought, okay, I would be super happy if it were to be selected in Un Certain Regard section — where the competition is very tough. Then we got into the competition. I feel we are really privileged because the film got a lot of attention that we wouldn’t have otherwise received.
In the film you pay tribute to Sister Lovely, the nurse from Kerala who looked after your grandmother, and to your grandmother herself. How long has the movie been with you and how did it evolve?
The making of the film took a long time— some six years. When I was making my diploma film (Afternoon Clouds) I was staying with my grandmother in Mumbai and we had a nurse caring for her. That is how the story came along. My diploma film was a story about a hospital and the nurses who had come from Kerala to work in Mumbai and made the city their home. They were independent, but not quite independent. This was the idea then.
While the hospital occupation of the nurses and them being from Kerala are still there, the film is also about friendship and how these three women — nurses Prabha and Anu played by Malayalam actors Kani Kusruti and Divya Prabha and the hospital employee Parvaty played by Marathi actor Chhaya Kadam — can be friends and one of them doesn’t even speak the same language like the other two. My hope is that people from Kerala will make friends with us.
How important was shooting in Mumbai, which is a symbol of the vast rich-poor divide in the country?
Absolutely. The rich-poor divide is the most visible in Mumbai. You hear all different languages on the train spoken by people who have been living in Mumbai for a long time and people who have just arrived. There were some important parts of the city that I wanted to look at. Lower Parel and Dadar used to be the old areas that had cotton mills until the ’80s. I remember when I was a kid we would hear the sound of the siren from the mill everyday. Then the mills were closed, the sirens died and a lot of people lost their jobs. A lot of them came from Ratnagiri, Maharashtra, where the second part of the film is based. I was always very keen to talk about the gentrification of that area; from what used to be the homes of the people who worked in the mills that were turning into malls and high rise buildings, where there are separate lifts for the people who work there and the people who live there.
It is actually land that has been grabbed from the people. There was a court order that said one-third of land should go to the families of the mill workers which never happened. The displacement of that area and the sort of grabbing that took place and the entire change of the skyline that happened was something that affected us a lot and we wanted to talk about that in the film.
How did the film turn into an international production with producers from several countries like France, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and Italy?
You know there isn’t any money for independent films in India. I didn’t want to have some private financiers, because the politics of the films was also in contradiction with a lot of ways films are financed in the country. If there was some way a body gave funding, then it would have been great to apply for it. Kerala has a fund for female filmmakers as well as those from under-represented castes. We have already seen great works coming out because of that. We don’t have that in the rest of the country. I met co-producers when I was visiting the Berlin film festival. I was very lucky because we met our producer and we had the same taste in films. It is a very young production company and this is their first feature too. I think the idea of a producer is different here. The producer is also doing a creative job here. There are so many systems in place in Cannes like the Residency and the Marché du Film. We made the previous film, ‘A Night of Knowing Nothing’, also together. They were co-producers in the film. It is not only financing, but also a good relationship.
How was it working with Malayalam actors and straddling so many languages?
I had a very good associate director, Robin Joy from Kerala, who was my junior at FTII. I kind of connected with him and got him on board two years ago. Then we got the actors involved. They also started rewriting dialogue according to their characters. I think it is a co-authored project. The person from Palakkad and Thiruvananthapuram would not see eye to eye on many subjects. Hridhu Haroon — who plays Shiaz in the film — is from Thiruvananthapuram. We made him the character from Vithura, which is near Thiruvananthapuram as he could have the same accent. Then Kani rewrote her dialogues in Kollam accent. Even Azees Nedumangad — who plays Dr Manoj — has the Thiruvananthapuram lisp at times.
You use the title of your mother’s (contemporary artist Nalini Malani) photography and film works for your movie.
That is true. I borrowed the title from my mother’s painting. When she was a student, my mother made some films where she was shooting the female body. I hadn’t seen them before, but recently they were restored and it was very nice to see how she had shot this young woman. I was very inspired by that.