Why Payal Kapadia's Cannes-bound ‘All We Imagine as Light' is a big win for Indian cinema

A co-production between India’s Chalk and Cheese Films and French banner Petit Chaos, the feature is set in Mumbai and “traces the lives of two migrant Malayali nurses as they navigate their life beyond the shackles of a collective consciousness that binds the women of this country”, read the synopsis on Chalk and Cheese’s Instagram page.

Starring Divya Prabha, Kani Kusruti, Azees Haneefa, Hridhu Haroon, Lovleen Misra and Chhaya Kadam, the film will be competing for the prestigious Palme d’Or against the likes of Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis, Yorgos Lanthimos’s Kinds of Kindness, Jacques Audiard’s Emilia Perez, Paul Schrader’s Oh Canada, Paolo Sorrentino’s Parthenope and Miguel Gomes’s Grand Tour, among others. This year’s jury president is Greta Gerwig, actress and more popularly the director and co-writer of last year’s biggest blockbuster Barbie.

A graduate of the Film & Television Institute of India, Kapadia is no stranger to Cannes. Her student short, Afternoon Clouds, was the only Indian film to compete at Cannes 2017, where it was part of the Cinefondation forum. In the 2021 edition, she won the Golden Eye award for best documentary for A Night of Knowing Nothing, which shows the dissolution of a relationship through poetic letters and against the backdrop of the student protests on the FTII campus.

The selection of All We Imagine as Light in the main competition, the first film from India since Malayalam drama Swaham (1994), is just adding to the laurels of the filmmaker.

All We Imagine as Light won’t be the only India-set film to make its world premiere at Cannes. Indo-British filmmaker Sandhya Suri’s Santosh, featuring Shahana Goswami and Sunita Rajwar, will be part of the Un Certain Regard section, which earlier has seen Indian titles Titli, Masaan and Chauthi Koot competing. The drama centres on newly widowed Santosh, who inherits her husband’s job as a police constable and becomes a part of the investigative team looking into the rape and murder of a lower caste girl. That both films are helmed by female directors and have narratives revolving around two women is a beautiful coincidence.

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