It is the Saturday before the Golden Globe nominations. 07:55 AM. I nervously open my Zoom meeting space, waiting for my kōrero with multi-award-winning Indian director Payal Kapadia. I pray to the internet gods for a smooth, interruption-free time. No slow connections or dropped links.
Payal asks to be admitted at 8.00am sharp. She wants to know what time it is in New Zealand. “I’m so sorry you had to get up early on a Saturday morning to talk to me.”
“It’s alright,” I say. “I’m a doctor, that is just our training.” (Also a single working mum who does her chores during early morning quiet times, but I don’t tell her that). “Where are you?” I ask.
“Somewhere in Europe,” she says. “I’ve lost my sense of time. Look at my eyes” she peers into her phone camera giving me a close-up view of her tired eyes. “Hope you are not going to post the video anywhere?”
“No,” I assure her. “I’ll just use the audio for my podcast, and we’ll take two screenshots.”
I had made one-word notes about All We Imagine As Light the day I watched it at the New Zealand International Film Festival in August this year. A deeply empathetic, political and feminist film set in my hometown Mumbai and a village in Ratnagiri district on the Konkan coast of my state Maharashtra a few hours away from my ancestral village in the neighbouring Sindhudurg district. All We Imagine As Light was the only Indian film after Chaitanya Tamhane’s Court and The Disciple that had reflected back Mumbai, her people, her history and the state of Maharashtra from the core within. Devoid of the North Indian Hindi dominant lens commonly seen across popular and art house Indian cinema. But the multiple evocations of All We Imagine As Light were more special. Like breathing the city’s humid air, eating fried bombil (Bombay duck), crab curry and aamras-puri ( ‘juice’ from the pulp of Payri and Hapus mangoes with a type of Indian bread). The red soil of the Konkan on my feet, my clothes sticking to my body. The protagonists were women, the gaze was female, and Easter eggs abounded. Especially one that drove the script without a word or a visual. Which meant a lot to me as a Mumbaikar.
So, one Mumbaikar to another I ask Payal whether the Mumbai in her film was how she perceived the city? “It is a city in flux,” she replies. Built by people who are not from there. Seven islands joined together by the British East India Company to make a harbour. A city whose entire premise is migration, where people are constantly being displaced. Compared to the rest of India it is a liberating experience for women to live in Mumbai yet there is cruelty under that facade. Especially the violence of gentrification. The architecture of Mumbai has changed such that you can drive on roads built above the slums, so you don’t see what is going on below. There is a shot in the film where the high-rise building of an investment bank towers over Parvati’s house from behind and we see the slums foregrounded below. Then there are the Mumbai monsoons that are so integral to the story. Endless, thick sheets of rain that keep falling. The water seeping into your hearts, your bodies and even the hard disks. That encapsulates Mumbai and that is what she tried to capture.
All We Imagine As Light was shot on an Arri Alexa Mini and a Canon on trains, at train stations, in various suburbs including Parel, Dahisar and the very crowded flower market in Dadar. Film industry union rules in Mumbai require you to have a minimum crew of about eighty and even though Payal respected those requirements it was not always possible to have a unit. Depending on what she wanted she only used the DSLR and a handheld sound recorder but also set up the Arri at train stations for long hours letting commuters get used to the camera. It was a matter of being discreet. Or not.
The film started out as a one-page concept in 2019 for Payal’s twenty-minute graduation project but she set it aside for another one. Films are like beasts though. They keep coming back to you wanting to be made in any way possible. So Payal worked on it in spurts and bouts until they filmed in 2023. This was her process as a director for All We Imagine As Light. “I was all over the place and the producer produced the hell out of me,” she laughs. It might be different for her next feature. Maybe.
How does one get funding to make a film anyway? There just isn’t any funding in India unless one approaches a private investor. Payal did not know how and she did not want to feel indebted to the investors. She praises her producers (Thomas Hakim and Julien Graff). The mostly European funds they got through various organizations gave her the freedom to make what she wanted. India has up to 40% tax incentive for international projects or co-productions filmed in the country. There was/is a rebate. We concur that every director needs a good producer.
The kōrero is incomplete without talking about Payal’s politics. Pardon the spoilers ahead but I had to ask. Unless specifically articulated, Mumbaikars from the ‘high-rise bubble’ would not even recognise that single invisible, silent component in All We Imagine As Light which pushes the film into its second half. And those who are not from Mumbai would likely not have a clue. Apart from being a major port Mumbai had a flourishing textile mill industry for more than a century with thousands of workers from the Konkan coast of Maharashtra living in nearby chawls. (One room tenements with toilets at the end of the row on each floor.) The mills dotted the inner central suburbs of Mumbai, Parel, where Payal filmed, being one of those places. The mill workers went on a long-drawn strike against poor working conditions and health cover in 1982. The rich owners shut their textile mills and sold the land to developers who replaced the chawls with luxury apartments and malls, displacing the mill workers and their families. That is the character of Parvati. Embodying the violence of gentrification in Mumbai. Compelled to give up her home and return to her village because her ownership paperwork is not ‘legal’ enough. Payal tells me she wanted to pay homage to the people of the Konkan coast who gave Mumbai her identity, her food, and her rich culture by centering a crucial contemporary historic event in All We Imagine As Light. I bring up the photos of Bhagat Singh, Savitribai and Jyotiba (Mahatma) Phule, icons of Indian resistance, prominently noticeable in one scene and the word azadi (freedom) scrawled on a cave wall in a distinctive shade of blue associated with the struggles of caste oppressed communities. “There is also the Ganesh festival, why it started and the connection to Mahatma Phule,” Payal says. “No need for me to talk more about it because those who know they know when they see it. We must respect the people who came before us and what they did. That is our politics.”
Payal was one the student leaders in a 139-day student protest at the premier Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) against a government appointed head and other systemic issues including neoliberal agendas. Filmmaking is a privilege and new filmmakers from non-privileged backgrounds must be supported instead of making it harder for them to seek admission at the institution. She confirms the protest informed and strengthened her storytelling. The government of India filed a civil lawsuit against thirty-five of the striking students including Payal that is ongoing today.
We are almost at the end of the allocated time, so I want to wrap up by discussing gender equity. Especially in the camera department and for women directors of photography. Payal speaks from an Indian viewpoint of course. She agrees it is harder for women in sound and cinematography. It is changing slowly in Mumbai but there is a long way to go. We need better working conditions for women. Checks and balances and laws to ensure women feel safe on set. Representation on and off screen makes any product better, and we should have good hiring policies. We must look at class, caste, region, religion, language, gender, sexuality. Who has access and who doesn’t. She knows she needs to improve her own practice to create gender equity and be inclusive.
The internet gods were benevolent to me that morning ensuring there were no tech interruptions. Payal was generous, humble and engaging whatever time it was wherever she was in Europe.
Two days later the Golden Globe further endorsed All We Imagine As Light with two nominations: Best Director and Best Motion Picture.
-Interview and article conducted by WIFT member Sapna Samant
-Picture, Payal on left, Sapna on right