All We Imagine As Light, one of the most talked-about films in recent times, that won the Grand Prix award at the 77th Cannes Film Festival, stars Kani Kusruti, Divya Prabha, and Chhaya Kadam. It follows Prabha (Kani Kusruti), a Mumbai nurse whose life is thrown in disarray when she receives a rice cooker from her estranged husband.
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 as a director.
Edited excerpts from the interview
Why did you choose Bombay as a city?
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.
But it’s also a very cruel and expensive city. It’s very hard to be able to live more tense, mate. Like, it’s just, you’re working to live and living to work, and it’s difficult. It’s not an easy city infrastructurally going every day to work and there’s all these complexities or even having a place to stay. So it’s these kinds of contradictions that I have a love-hate relationship with Mumbai, and, I felt that I wanted to document this city because it’s also a city that’s always in a state of flux. Whether it’s people coming and going or the actual shape of our city has changed now.
Every day the city is changing. New building is coming in the skyline. Like, you’ve never seen it before. Some giant glass building. And now we are also hearing about who lives in those buildings? I sometimes wonder why there are so many empty houses. The rents are so high. Prices are so high. I’m buying those houses. Who actually is buying them? I really wonder. There’s so many empty apartments you’ll get to see once you drive down. I always thought people lived there, but I didn’t know that people don’t claim. There are so many empty unclaimed houses. There are so many huge, beautiful, buildings also, which once I mean, houses also, which now has become nobody who lives there.
What do you have to say about Chhaya Kadam’s role in the film?
It’s many, many different things that came together for this character. But since I’ve seen Mumbai for many years, for me, the area of the film is shot in, which is lower parallel and. There was a kid that time that used to be more with cotton mills. I remember when I was in Bombay, there were more cotton mills. Cotton mill area that used to be, and it should be all over there that used to be the main housing area. And most of the people who work there were coming from the Konkan region of Ratnagiri, which is where the character is also from. So I was thinking a lot about the kind of shift that area has faced in the past 20 years after the mills shut down.
There’s been, like, a very violent gentrification where all those mills have mostly been converted into shopping malls or very, very expensive cafes or furniture shops and things like that. The people who once lived there can never enter those spaces. So this was a concern that I was thinking a lot about. Like, what happened to all those people who used to live there before or who will be working in these mills? And these giant buildings, like you pointed out, have come up over there, which have these very gated communities where Mumbai didn’t used to be like that.
It used to be a city where people had access to space, at least public space in a big way, which more and more it’s getting taken away from people. So I’ve been thinking a lot about and now there’s a flyover that passes through everything, so you don’t see anything anymore, the JJ flyover. So there is kind of an erasure of this particular history of labor in Mumbai, which I was very concerned about. I mean I’ve been thinking about it a lot because if you’re from Mumbai for a long time, you cannot think about it, I feel. It’s a very strong part of Mumbai’s identity.
So this was my concern, and I was thinking a lot about women, like, and I have been following up a lot, about the housing movements that have happened over here that since then, even now, there are unions, workers’ unions and lawyers working for the rights of those people who deservedly needed a place to stay, and they were supposed to get housing, but they didn’t. So, that was also the union that the meeting that I’ve put in the film, which is a kind of a small window into that world, which I think was a strong, history of Mumbai linked to that.
When I interviewed Kani and Chhaya, Kani said that initially the role played by Divya was her role, but then what happened was it took time for the movie and then her age, her appearance did not match to that role. What was it like choosing the actors?
I have been a fan of Kani for so long. I wanted to work with her. Since I was a student at FTII, I had thought that I would do something with her. So I had gotten in touch with her, and I wanted to have, like, the role of Anu because she had made a movie which I really liked with her. Her performance is really good in that, and her character is very playful and naughty. So I felt that that would go well with the character of Anu. But as the film took a long time to make, both she and I grew older. And then, since I always wanted to work with her, I asked her, like, can you try for the other role? And by then, she had done a lot of roles of a more serious character, she’s done a lot of films where she plays different characters. So then I said, okay. Let me try for this. And even though I had imagined it, one has to change, as time passes, what to do. It’s inevitable change. So I approached her for that, and then it worked out well.
And for Divya, how did you get in touch with Divya?
Again, both of them, I wasn’t sure. I just really liked them as actors, but I wasn’t sure, like, if they would be those characters. Because of this, I had to completely change my mindset to go from Anu to Prabha. And with Divya also, like, I had seen her in this movie called Ariyipu. It’s a very nice film. It’s on Netflix. And I really, really like this film, and I really liked her in it. And I just felt that she acted so well. I want to work with her somehow or the other. But I didn’t know how because in that movie, she’s been made to play an older person, and it’s a very serious kind of stone character. So I had a bit of repetition, like, will she be the Anu that I’m looking for or what to do, basically? I just want to work with her. Then she came to visit me because I like to do when I’m very serious about the actors, I like to call them. Like, when it’s a later stage, basically, you’re casting, then I like to call them over to my place, and we stay together and discuss a lot of things.
I like to work like that because I feel actors are true collaborators to any director, and we have to find some kind of way that we can discuss and have a fruitful collaboration. So I called her over, and she came off the train, and I was waiting for her at the station. And she was, like, she had this buoyancy in her steps, which was so nice and light, and I was like, she actually can easily play Anu. So then I asked her to do that, to play Anu. And, Anu’s character is actually much younger than she is in person, but she’s so good as an actor that she completely became like this girl.
She really worked really hard to get this, you know, bounce in her step and she worked on her physicality and she did her hair in a certain way and she really worked a lot on that and I really appreciate that. And is obviously a very, very, very talented top star. When I narrated the script to her she was very, very open and very nice, and the good thing was that she’s also from Ratnagiri. Like, she’s obviously very her own, hometown is not very far from very short. So she knew a lot of the nuances. Her father used to work in the mills. So she knew very well this movement from Ratnagiri to Mumbai, and she knew a lot of people, unfortunately, who were having this housing crisis also, who had been forced to leave and go back to Ratnagiri.
So she was very sensitive to the character and all the things that are in the film, of that character. So it and then she added so many of the dialogues to make them more, like, Konkani, Mumbai and, just the way she speaks Hindi. And some dialogues are written, but she made them better. Like, there’s a line where she says that we are nurses, we are better off alone. So she made that into something I don’t know. I just feel that it gives us so much more character.
Why did it take so much time for the entire project to get over? Were you procrastinating?
I made this film trying to raise money, which was from government grants. 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, in the middle. I made another film. So that was also in Cannes in 2021. It’s called A Night Of Knowing Nothing. After that film was done, I had the funding. So from 2022 onwards, I started working on this film. I shot in 2023, and it’s out by 2024. So, actually, it didn’t take that much time. It was more than raising the funding beforehand that took time.
Now coming to being an independent filmmaker, how difficult is it in India especially?
Making films is difficult only. Even if you have all the funding, it’s still really difficult to make films because there’s so many things to factor in. But since we’ve chosen this profession, I also love it a lot. Independently, you’re doing it.
So how difficult is that process?
I mean, like I said, it’s been taking a long time to raise the funding. So it was, it takes a lot of rejection, applying for many grants and applying for a lot of different things that people are applying from all over the world. Every filmmaker is applying for those same grants. So it requires some patience and a good support system in your producers, and then just to keep at it, I guess. It’s difficult, but things are difficult only.
Then would you enjoy the process and the success? How sure were you that this movie is gonna do so well internationally?
When you’re making films, you don’t always think about where it will have some success or it will not. We’re just trying to get it done. And, because once it’s not just the money you raise for shooting. The post production is so expensive. You’re thinking about music rights. All these things play a factor in finishing the film, and you want to do it the way you want to do it. Like, without making too many compromises and seeing it through, basically. It’s finally at the end of the day like a little child that you’ve raised, for many years and to just make sure that it’s how you wanted it to be. So that in itself, like, I didn’t really think about the outcome of how it’ll be, but then I’d be able to be honest to the process of how much time I put into it.
And you put 3 age groups together. One is a little elderly woman. The second is like, a middle age, I would say, and this young girl. But what do you have to say about this, like, what is this thought that went behind putting these 3 women together?
I was thinking that it could be like a chronology of one life, and there we are just meeting them at different points of a woman’s journey. And I felt that that could be done well if it’s generational friendship.
And did you take inspiration? Which character do you relate to the most?
For me, it went through a lot of change because when I started writing the film, I was closer to Anu’s age. So I was feeling more I was seeing the film from her eyes. But as I grew older and since it took this much time, my allegiance has also shifted more to be more towards Prabha’s age. So I was thinking a lot, like, my empathy towards that character, and, I felt that there was something resonating more with me there.
I’m always a little bit of everything moving from here to the other because I feel that sometimes as I grow older, I feel that maybe I am not understanding the younger generation. Is there something in me that I am not able to adapt to how people think now? What do you know, so those kinds of questions I have in my mind. And I’m trying all the time to work it out for myself, and I think that was the question in the film also.
And what next?
I’m trying to make at least 2 more films, which are like an anthology of Mumbai, because it’s a city that I’m not done with yet. There’s so much to think about the history and the continuous change of this city and what it means for so many people. So I’m writing another film that’s going to be based in Mumbai.
This post was originally published on here
