There are only a handful of Indian films that defy the conventional description and invite the audiences into a world that can only be understood through experience rather than explanation. One such film is Payal Kapadia’s ‘ALL WE IMAGINE AS LIGHT’. Set against the bustling yet isolated backdrop of Mumbai, this cinematic triumph transcends narrative boundaries to create something profound and deeply personal. Through a stunning combination of magical realism and grounded storytelling, it delves into themes of love, loss, identity, and self-discovery. Apart from the storytelling, the cinematography by Ranabir Das, elevates the film to an ethereal realm, capturing the stark contrasts of Mumbai’s urban landscape with poetic finesse. The camera lingers on the city’s chaos and quiet, using light and shadow to mirror the inner worlds of its characters.

The artistic brilliance has not gone unnoticed, as ‘ALL WE IMAGINE AS LIGHT‘ has garnered widespread acclaim and a plethora of prestigious accolades on the international festival circuit. For Payal and Ranabir, this roaring success is something that they never imagined, as their focus was solely on telling an authentic and deeply personal story. After winning the Grand Prix accolade at this year’s Cannes, the film has solidified its position as a landmark in contemporary Indian cinema. It’s so brilliant to see an Indian filmmaker garnering so much success at the global level, and becoming the first-ever female filmmaker from India to receive a Best Director nod at the Golden Globes. Recently, I had the fortune of talking to Payal Kapadia, and DOP Ranabir Das, about their film and how they created such a magnificent world where moments of magical realism are brought to life by surreal imagery.

Here’s the FULL INTERVIEW:

Aayush Sharma: Congratulations on the incredible win for ‘All We Imagine As Light’. The past few days must have been a whirlwind of emotions, from press engagements to screenings, culminating in this well-deserved triumph. How does it feel to see all the hard work and passion behind this film being celebrated on such a grand stage? Has the magnitude of this achievement truly sunk in yet?

Payal Kapadia: It’s been really more than we ever imagined for the film. When we were in Cannes, it already felt so big. Every time something else happens, we feel like we want to pinch ourselves. We worked on the film for a long time—especially the two of us (Payal and Ranabir Das), since we write together as well. It’s been a project we’ve worked on, on and off, for almost six or seven years, and intensely over the past four years. Sometimes, you feel like it’s over, and that itself feels so weird.

Aayush Sharma: The city of Mumbai plays such a central role in your film. How did you approach portraying Mumbai not just as a setting but as a character in itself, with its heartbeat and stories?

Payal Kapadia: I think it’s because, you know when you make a film—or at least when I make a film—it’s kind of like a reaction to your surroundings. What forces itself into the film is something that concerns you or something you see all the time, and you get bothered by it. The contradictions of Mumbai, I think, are very much part of our daily life. For the past five years, we have been living here together. On one side, you see everybody moving here—especially in the film industry—because all our friends from FTII also moved to Mumbai. In some senses, it’s kind of liberating because you have your own kind of freedom here to do things. But it’s also a city that can be very cruel. It’s a very expensive city, not very comfortable to navigate or travel in every day, considering the amount of time it takes. There is also constant gentrification taking place. It’s a city that’s always in a state of change because the people who come with a lot of difficulty can also be very easily made to leave. We especially saw that during the COVID time. It’s also a city that is geographically changing because it’s like an island city that became attached to the peninsula. And now, land reclamation is also taking place. So even physically, the city is like an amoeba. I was very interested in all these things about the city, and some of it makes us very angry also.

Ranabir Das: In general, Mumbai is a city where so many films are shot. But in very few films do we actually see the city. We just wanted to document some senses of now—a time now—that will remain somewhere.

Payal Kapadia: Because I think that Mohammad Ali Road, that area, will also one day get gentrified and be shot. And I feel like we wanted to also remember different, different places.

Aayush Sharma: The shift from the bustling urban landscape of Mumbai to the serene coastal village marks a significant tonal change. How did you conceptualize this transition, and what does it signify in the larger context of the story?

Ranabir Das: Well, on some levels, it’s very basic. Like, we just wanted a shift, a change in season. Yeah. A little bit of time has gone by between the previous events and what is to follow. In that sense, the largest shift, I think, is that the first half is very cloudy, and the second half is very bright sun. The color palette also shifts in the process. But we wanted the second half to have a slightly different feeling of time as well. We wanted it to be just one long day, this entire second half. So we wanted to feel the time a little bit more. We wanted to be a little closer to the characters. In the city, we always included the city a little bit in the background or in some plane. There’s always some presence of the city creeping in. But over here, we wanted to be physically closer to the characters and be with them more.

Payal Kapadia: The type of this village, but our intention at least was to somewhere avoid looking at that too much, okay, and being with the character. Yeah, like that’s why most—at least what we tried, I don’t know how much of it came through—but a lot of time, Riku would bleach out some of the background when it was a very wide shot, for example, because the sunlight would not kind of, you know, just stick to that cliche of a pretty place. Something that, you know, that heat—I don’t know if you are from Delhi, but I guess in Delhi also, in the summer, that very top sun is like, it’s not very pleasant. So that feeling, we wanted to kind of get. I think, yeah, because Mumbai looks so different, I think that contrast has been much.

Aayush Sharma: The film opens with a documentary-style montage of street scenes and migrant voices. How did your background in documentary filmmaking shape this approach, and what was your intent behind blending this style with fiction?

Payal Kapadia: You know, like, I think both of us are very process-driven filmmakers. So a lot of time, we end up doing a lot of research and, you know, not even just research—when we go for location scouting, you sit, you chat with people, you have chai, you eat, or we just meet people for the sake of, you know, understanding things better. While doing that, we were getting a lot of different stories from people—people were telling us, and our friends were also telling us. So we wanted to keep the essence of those conversations somehow in the film, though we didn’t know how. I think it was the same with our previous film too—like, a lot of the stuff that’s there comes out later because of interactions with reality. You can imagine some things, you write certain things, you have a script, and everything, and then reality comes and says, ‘Hello,’ which is nice. I really enjoy that, and I think we really enjoy that. So we wanted to keep a feeling of those conversations and random interactions. We also felt like somehow it gave a kind of symphony of the city, with all the people here. It’s a city made up of people from different parts of the state, and different parts of the country, and you hear so many languages in Mumbai. It’s a very diverse space. So we wanted to have a jhalak of that in the film.

Ranabir Das: Also, we felt that it was something that was treating it like there are so many stories floating around, and we are entering one of them. Just one thing we are delving into deeper, and then that fiction also becomes a little bit more real after that.

Aayush Sharma: The film is dedicated to your grandmother and your friend who’s a nurse. How did their lives and experiences inspire the story of All We Imagine as Light, and what personal connections shaped your approach to telling this tale?

Payal Kapadia: For me, my grandmother’s story has been a nagging string for all my films so far. Every film has this copy in it. All my short films have it. Basically, when she was in her 90s, she started losing her memory. So, I told her, just to kind of keep the mind moving, ‘Why don’t you write a diary?’ So, she started writing the diary. And somehow, in the diary, this husband of hers used to keep appearing. Now, she was 97 or 96 or something like this. Her husband died when she was 50. So, all these years, she was single. But at this time, it was he who was coming out, coming in her dreams and coming almost like a person, like a ghost, and was annoying her. So, she was very irritated. I think she didn’t get along with him very much. So, I was thinking a lot about that, like this kind of thing that a lot of women around me—like they are independent, they are living alone, working jobs, financially independent—but these men don’t seem to go. So, I was thinking a lot about that, and like, kind of, you know, that our ideas in India, we have to look at our feminism in a way, keeping these kinds of things in mind. At least for me, this is my perspective. Everybody has their own. So, like, it is these lingering men who we don’t want them to define us, but they’re there. Now, what to do? So, that’s kind of what this film is about. Like, this Prabha also, you know, kind of trying to leave this chap who just popped up out of nowhere. So, yeah, that’s it.

For the nurse, she was very open to telling me all about the early…like, all this stuff about learning about the placenta, how their training used to be. So, that is what got me into the nursing profession—it’s because of all this. She used to tell me about how it was for them when they were students and, you know, the kind of things on a day-to-day basis, how it was. So, I got very…like, she was very open to keep telling me. I would WhatsApp her saying, ‘Is this clinically correct?’ and all that. Very generous with that—consulting all the information and the nursing stories. Many nurses have helped in this, and we did so many interviews, but she was one of the first people I spoke to.

Aayush Sharma: Riku, I needed to understand, and explain to me like I am a 10-year-old. For you, getting to know about the characters, struggles, and everything else, play a significant role in using certain visual techniques, like lighting and all. 

Ranabir Das: Yes, absolutely. It’s not only about what a character is feeling or going through at the present time but also about the larger vision of how a director wants the story to be told. So, with each project I undertake, I make a conscious effort to be as true and honest to the essence of that project as possible. It’s about ensuring that the character’s journey, emotions, and experiences resonate with the overall narrative and the director’s creative vision.

Aayush Sharma: The majority of the film is in Malayalam, reflecting the reality that many nurses in Mumbai come from Kerala. As someone who didn’t grow up speaking the language, how did you navigate the challenge of authentically portraying this linguistic and cultural context? What steps did you take to ensure that the nuances of Malayalam-speaking characters were captured with depth and accuracy?

Payal Kapadia: I have to say, it was tough, and took extra time to get this right. But I had Robin Joy and Naseem, my dialogue writers, who are both from Kerala and also filmmakers. I actually met Robin at FTII, and I’ve always liked his writing and short films. I wanted to work with him because I felt we connected well emotionally, politically, and in terms of our social contexts. So, I brought him on board almost two years ago, in 2022. He then began rewriting the dialogues based on how we had discussed the characters. For example, we decided that Anu would be from Palakkad, so we adjusted her accent and even incorporated her specific slang. We also worked on how the characters would communicate on WhatsApp, using that Gen Z style of texting. Robin and Naseem truly dedicated a whole year to rewriting and refining the dialogues.

When we worked with the actors, we’d re-examine the dialogues together. The actors would deliver their lines, and we’d listen to the recordings to hear how they sounded. This process was essential because, otherwise, how would I direct in a language I don’t fully understand, right? We did a lot of rehearsals to help me get a sense of what they were saying and how it felt. With Robin’s expertise, he’d point out if something didn’t sound quite right, which was incredibly helpful. Having someone like him by my side made the whole process smoother and more authentic.

Aayush Sharma: All We Imagine as Light is a deeply political film, yet much of the discussion around it focuses on its aesthetics or limits its politics to an Indian context, overlooking its universal relevance. Have you noticed this, and how do you feel about such interpretations?

Ranabir Das: We’ve tried in our own way, though I’m not sure how successfully it comes through or to what extent we’ve been right or not. But we’ve tried to include some elements. I think that, in general, any film you watch is political, whether the filmmakers intended it to be or not. You can read into it, and you’ll find things that are, in some ways, political. In that sense, there are definitely aspects of this film that are more directly political, but everything else also becomes something to interpret and understand. Ultimately, everyone will have their own interpretation.

Payal Kapadia: Yeah, true. But I think some things are so deeply rooted for us, like the context of the papers and the relationship, or some of the little things we’ve kept in the film that we haven’t even subtitled. I feel like there’s always this balance between explaining things and allowing people to feel them. And we’re always struggling with this balance—how much to explain or for which audience. So, at the end of the day, this is the balance we’ve found for this film. We’ll see how it goes with the next one. But yeah, many people don’t fully understand our country. There are so many things here, so many contexts, so many layers. Some people even ask me if we speak “Indian,” and I’m like, no! So, what can we do? Even within the country, the arts often represent just one voice and one opinion. Interpretation will always be different. I think even within our country, a film about Delhi will be seen differently by someone who’s never been there or lived there. All of these things are true, and one of my goals was to avoid falling into clichés about nursing, the characters, or anything else. They are just people. There’s nothing you can label as clichéd about their identity. That was something I thought a lot about, but again, that’s the beauty of cinema. You create something, then you see how people react and learn from it, understanding what you did and always striving to do better, I guess.

Aayush Sharma: You are quite active on social media, especially on Twitter. Recently, you talked about the wrong aspect ratio in theatres. What happened there?

Payal Kapadia: Don’t make me cry. please. (laughs) But since I posted it on Twitter, at least people are talking about it. I’ve noticed that people are going, and the brave ones are stopping the projection. I don’t understand that—so many films must be shot in 1.85:1 at least.

Aayush Sharma: Mr. Hansal Mehta, the director, said on social media that a movie like ‘All We Imagine As Light’ is failing to get support from streaming platforms. Was that true? and what did you learn from that process?

Ranabir Das: In our case, there is some interest from streaming platforms that producers are looking at.

Payal Kapadia: But the problem is that in our case, since we’re releasing in so many countries, we can’t do an international sale. This makes streaming platforms a bit hesitant, I guess—it’s an issue for them as they all want international reach. And we really wanted a release time. We wanted the film to be in cinemas for a longer duration, so that was one of the points I put forth—what I could say in this matter. But the other thing you’re pointing out, distribution is a real problem. This year, there were so many films from India at Cannes. Directors of Indian origin, my batchmate Maisa Malli’s film was there in ACID. It’s a really nice film, and I think it was at MAMI as well. We’re getting attention in the news and everything, but there were so many films there. There was Sister of Midnight, there was Santosh, and Girls Will Be Girls, which I think has done quite well but didn’t get a cinema release. So I think we should find a way to watch our own country’s films in the cinema, even if they are small. Why can’t we get one slot a day for these films? Why aren’t exhibitors willing to take that challenge? Anyway, they have multiplexes, so they can show the big movies, and if they show one smaller film once a month, it could be very good. The way she makes films is incredible, so on her own, and the films are fantastic. I think so many people would enjoy watching them, like schoolchildren. They could do outings and take all the kids from some schools to the cinema. The cinemas could offer discounted prices too.

Ranabir: I feel that these kinds of interactive things could be a way to keep people engaged from a young age and encourage critical thinking. Cinema can do that as well. And regarding your initial question about OTT, it’s becoming an increasingly difficult market in general. When it first came in, it seemed like there was scope for independent cinema. There was also some amount of money that filmmakers and producers could access.

Aayush Sharma: Both the films that you are a part of are basically independent films. For All We Imagine As Light, you saw a lot backing coming up after the movie won at Cannes. Then, Rana Daggubatti got involved in it. As someone who is deeply involved in this movie, did you see any kind of difference in how the movie was taken to theatres or distributors once a person like Rana got into the process?

Ranabir Das: Yes, I mean, he also has a distribution company, so in that sense, he knows the exhibitors, he understands the market. I don’t know if it’s simply because of his start, but yeah, as a distributor, he definitely has some amount of experience and knowledge in this area.

Payal Kapadia: I think it really helped us because he has, especially in the south, a lot of connections. They come from a family of distribution, and he’s also putting weight behind the film. See, we don’t have the budget for big posters or to put it on a bus, or even to have it in the cinema. There weren’t any more traditional methods like that. So, talking to the press and having him there to support was kind of our way to reach out.

Aayush Sharma: You’ve previously highlighted the challenges of securing funding for independent films in India. Could you share more about your experiences navigating this landscape and how it shaped the journey of bringing ‘All We Imagine as Light’ to life?

Ranabir Das: I mean, initially, it was a bit scary because we didn’t actually know if the film would ever get made. But our producers gave us some amount of confidence, and we faced a few rejections as well. However, as we started getting more funds and the script began developing further, we started receiving more money. With that, we felt more confident, and we realized that it was a system that helped us.

Payal Kapadia: One thing we learned throughout this process is what a producer truly is. At least in the West, a producer isn’t someone who has their own money or a company with funds, but rather, they are the ones who can shape your project in a way that allows you to secure funding from other sources. It’s really a collaboration. They will read the project and, if they believe in it, they won’t just agree with you—they will trust their opinion and offer their support. It’s important to find someone whose judgment you trust and who also believes in you, and who will say, “Okay, let’s do this. Whatever happens, we’ll make it happen.” We received a lot of that kind of motivation, even from our producer here in India. He did his best to get the film off the ground, finding the right people for us to work with, and we ended up with a fantastic team of collaborators. All of that is what makes the film what it is—not just one person, but the collective effort of many people coming together.

Aayush Sharma: I had the pleasure of interviewing Kani Kusruti, and she told me that you (Payal) had envisioned her as Anu. So, how did the change happen?

Payal Kapadia: Yeah, back then, when I was still a student, I wrote about two pages of a concept for the film, a loose idea about two friends who were nurses. But I hadn’t done much research at that time. It was just a basic thought, and I wanted to make a 20-minute film about it. At that time, I had seen her short film Memories of a Machine, and I really liked her performance in it, so we wanted to cast her as Anu. However, I decided not to pursue it for FTII because I felt there was still a lot I needed to understand before making this film. I didn’t feel like I had the right connection at the time, so I let it go. After that, I started researching, meeting more people, gathering stories, and eventually realized it had to be a feature film. And that, of course, takes time. So I would work on it, then leave it, come back to it, and make another film in between. Throughout all this, I kept sending Kanni the script.

I thought I might not be able to do it at a younger age. Both of us had gotten older, and we were the same age, so I wondered, what could I do? But then she said, “Let me try for the older one.” Still, I think I was so fixated on her being Anu that it was initially hard for me to accept that she could play the older version. But she’s just such a fine artist, a wonderful actor, and incredibly hardworking. It’s amazing. She is so inspiring, and I feel so lucky to have met her.

Ranabir Das: You know, for Anu, we had seen Divya in ‘Declaration’. Yeah, yeah. And she was playing an older character in that film, so we initially thought of her as Prabha.

Aayush Sharma: The film uses magical realism and lyrical elements in the second half. How do you see this blending of realism and fantasy as a way to explore the inner worlds of your characters? 

Payal Kapadia: Well, I wanted to go from this very day-in-the-life style of city people, using wide shots of a city with a shaky camera, to go deeper and deeper, until we reached such a close point that we could capture the texture of the skin, the hair on the body, and the grain of sand. We wanted to approach it as if we were using a microscope, where we first show a wide shot and then funnel down to something as small as the grain of sand on a man’s body. The transition from that vérité style to something like magical realism felt natural, becoming more internal. I was thinking a lot about how to express desire, as in our society, it’s not something you talk about. How do you say “I love you” in English? How do you say it if you haven’t said it yet? It’s difficult. We can’t express these things easily. So I thought, cinematically, how will she hear it, or what will she say? Cinema allows us to speak without speaking. I wanted to find a language in our own way to talk about certain things, and this seemed to be the right way, a magical one. I was thinking a lot about how this had been done in the past.

In Rajasthan, Gujarat, or Karnataka on the western coast, folk tales often tell stories about longing and the men who go away as merchants. There’s a lot of travel and many women’s tales about how they cannot talk to their husbands. One famous one is Duvida, where the husband comes back as a ghost, and she falls in love with him, but eventually, he gets caught. There are stories where the man becomes a tree or a thief. Sangam poetry also uses nature to talk about longing. I was thinking about all these things, as well as a short story by Márquez I read where a man washes up in a village. While he’s passed out, the women start saying things like, ‘Oh, he’s so handsome,’ or, ‘His family must have made big doors in the house because he’s so tall,’ creating their own stories. Their desires are projected onto the dead man. So I was interested in this idea of not being able to speak, and how we start projecting things and find a way to release that pain. In my head, it all just made sense.

Payal Kapadia’s ‘ALL WE IMAGINE AS LIGHT’ is playing worldwide.