Love Is Political: Payal Kapadia on "All We Imagine as Light"

Across the two features she’s made to date, Payal Kapadia has emerged as a luminous new voice in Indian cinema, exploring the personal as political through her shimmering, empathetic portraits of working-class Mumbai. 

Her first feature, “A Night of Knowing Nothing,” opened with unsent love letters, from a film student to her estranged lover, discovered in a box at the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII), where Kapadia herself studied; made over five years as a collage of new and archival footage, the film juxtaposed the dissolution of an inter-caste relationship with the collective dissent of students protesting the appointment of a right-wing former actor as their institute’s chairperson. Shifting between experimental, narrative, and hybrid documentary modes, Kapadia’s debut dissipated stricture in all forms, depicting romance in revolt and truth through fiction. 

Similarly existing between dreams and reality, her new film “All We Imagine as Light” (now in theaters) follows the sisterhood between three women bonded by work in a Mumbai hospital. Head nurse Prabha (Kani Kusruti), recent hire Anu (Divya Prabha), and hospital cook Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam) come from different backgrounds and speak different languages, but they’re united in their struggle to survive a densely populated, often isolating metropolis. Prabha’s husband emigrated to Germany soon after their arranged marriage, leaving her alone and longing for connection. Anu is secretly carrying on an affair with a Muslim man, in defiance of her Hindu family. Parvaty, recently widowed, faces eviction from the chawl where she’s lived for two decades. 

Though their stories are their own, Kapadia illuminates connections between all three women, crafting a lyrical portrait of female solidarity in the face of the many forces — marital status, religious backgrounds, language barriers, caste or class status, gentrification — shaping their identities and circumstances. Mumbai, in her films, is a site of great contradiction, where protest and poetry coincide and only the innermost desires of those living there, once expressed, can truly light a path away from the patriarchal inequalities of the everyday, toward a more beautiful resistance. 

“All We Imagine as Light” was the first Indian film in 30 years to premiere in competition at the Cannes Film Festival, where it won the Grand Prix. A co-production between India and France, the film was shortlisted by both countries as a potential Oscar submission in the best international film category but ultimately selected by neither. Still, much as last year’s “Anatomy of a Fall” was nominated in five categories and won best original screenplay despite not being submitted by France, U.S. distributors Janus Films and Sideshow plan to campaign “All We Imagine as Light” for best picture.

With “All We Imagine as Light” now in theaters, expanding nationwide in the coming weeks, Kapadia sat down with RogerEbert.com to reflect on the nature of light, states of flux, and romance as resistance.

This interview has been edited and condensed. 

I wanted to start by asking about the title of your film, which I understand is borrowed from the title of one of your mother’s paintings. Can you describe what inspired you about that painting?

It’s a very large painting, with lots of figures in it. It was not specifically the elements of the painting but more its title that inspired me. My mother always has great titles for her work. The first scene I wrote in the film was with the phantom husband of Prabha. Somehow, the title of this painting, “All We Imagine as Light,” connected with that scene, in a way I can’t exactly put into words. It gave me this feeling of hope and the possibility of another way of being when you know no other way. This title worked for me in that context. Light also exists in terms of everything that you can see, as seeing is because of light bouncing off objects. It was all of those things, more than anything precise. Sometimes, you just connect to a line that feels right and resonates with what you have in your mind while you’re writing.

With your previous film, “A Night of Not Knowing,” you started filming while you were a student at the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII), to document protests against the appointment of a right-wing actor as its head. Tell me more about your path to becoming a filmmaker, the decision to study at FTII, and using the tools you learned there to make films exploring student unrest.

I’m a big cinephile. I love watching films. Going to FTII was great, because the Indian National Film Archive was connected to my film school; we would have screenings every alternate day, spending one day at the film archive and one day at our school. It was a treasure trove in terms of watching films, which was great, because the reason I went to film school at all was because I had started going to film festivals in Mumbai. It was an extension of that. Watching films was obviously something that I was very keen on doing.  

At FTII, film studies were quite theoretical as well. This was not taken too seriously by everybody, but I found myself quite attracted to studying directors and analyzing in detail how certain films were made. At this time, we would study montage, and we would study it very precisely: montage from the Soviet perspective, which was more Eisenstein's montage, and then the American perspective, which was more Griffith. We’d do an analysis of how form and politics are so deeply linked; it was these conversations that led to formalistic ideas that I finally ended up putting in the film, when it came to montage and light. It’s a real privilege being a film student, at least for somebody who's a cinephile. It was a really good period for me.

In “A Night of Knowing Nothing,” you quote poet Aamar Aziz: “Everything will be remembered.” You’ve reflected, about making that film, that “material collected over some years began to make sense only as a large archive of memories,” and I’m curious to what degree you see this idea reflected in a narrative feature like “All We Imagine as Light” as well: the cinema as a medium of memory.

It’s hard to perceive precisely; it’s a difficult question, and I’d need to think about it. Memory and dreams, and subjective reality in some senses, are a big part of “All We Imagine as Light.” There’s an inner landscape that is more at the forefront of the film. The two films are quite different in this formalistic approach and pattern but, politically, I think the themes are still connected. 

You bring together elements of documentary filmmaking with poetry and magical realism, especially in the film’s latter half. How did you find a balance between those elements?

I was keen to start with an almost vérité approach, seemingly like a documentary about the city, and then go  somewhere else, into the lives of one strand of the city, then finally go into a very inner landscape and find a completely subjective perspective that’s so away from reality that it's a fable but can perhaps sit in the same film. I really enjoy films that go so seamlessly from one thing to the other; for example, the films of Alice Rohrwacher, which can be so neo-realistic but also like fairy tales.

Often, you’re finding poetry in the mundane as well, in the way you capture and describe Mumbai as a liminal space for its characters. Even in the film’s opening, we hear in Gujarati the sentiment that “the city takes time away from you,” that “you better get used to impermanence.”

One of the things about Mumbai that always strikes me is its state of flux. For me, this is one of the most prominent images of Mumbai that you see, especially now, because it's a city that was never a city. It was a swamp, and it was seven islands joined together by the British East India Company — not even the government, but the British East India Company to start with, so that they could make it a viable port. These seven floating islands became a city for entirely commercial reasons; its very beginning came from change. 

Ever since then, the extreme problem of Mumbai has always been that it is still an island, so you can’t expand the land. Things get really expensive, because of the price of land in Mumbai. For the past 10 years, Mumbai has been constantly redeveloping; now, in fact, as we speak, 500 meters of the sea has been re-encroached into. It’s not just the shape or the land of the city but, constantly, within the city, there is continuous displacement and a change in architecture that you see because of that displacement. It’s a visual quality of the city. You can’t escape it. You take any road, and you will see, in five years, it’s completely changed. 

There’s a certain physical impermanence in the city, which directly leads to the impermanence of a fragile life for the people who are displaced within the city. One of the largest slums in Mumbai is Dharavi — and even though it’s called a slum, it’s actually a living space for millions of people who’ve been there for a long time, though they probably don’t have any paperwork to prove they’ve lived there. Now, they’re going through a redevelopment project; the government has sanctioned one of the richest men in India, to redevelop Dharavi. I really don’t know what’s going to happen, but it’s going to lead to mass displacement. 

Your film expresses this wealth divide directly through the situation of Parvaty, but all the characters in your film find both their relationship to space and their relationship to time influenced by their social and economic standing in Mumbai. In the latter half of the film, though, Parvaty returns to her childhood village by the sea, and Prabha and Anu follow her there. Your sense of time slowing down in this latter half is fascinating to me.

In the scripting stage itself, I was fascinated with the idea of working with time, in the sense of the first half being much quicker, with the feeling of montage, that time is compressed, and in the second half to have just one day, an extended day. The expansion of time is a tool in cinema; I was keen to see if these feelings could be juxtaposed together, to have this larger montage between these two different feelings of time. That was, on paper, something that I was very excited to do — because, in cinema, you can. That’s one of the great joys of cinema: to work with time.

Some of the themes in the film, I also felt, could be reflected through this different feeling of time. The first kind of time is a more city-driven, work-driven, capitalistic feeling of time, where you really have no time for yourself. You’re always on the move, or you’re spending time in the train, living to earn and earning to live in this vicious cycle where there’s no free time. This forced holiday allows for time to slow down. A lot of times, when you move to a different city—and it happens in India a lot, for people who move to Mumbai to work—holidays would mean going back to their family homes. You’re compelled to do that, and it’s not a particularly great holiday. It could be nice for two or three days; beyond that, it can be quite suffocating. I wanted this to be a forced holiday, where time could actually be suspended, and life could be experienced in a different way.

Tell me about Mumbai’s monsoon color, bringing out these sensations of heat and humidity through sound and image; there’s an oppressive quality to the sensations of Mumbai, and a relative lightness to the village by the sea.

You’re absolutely right about the feeling of being in Mumbai as this sweaty, swampy feeling. Mumbai has really high humidity, especially in the monsoon season;  all the time, you feel like you are in a soup. We were very keen to, in every aspect, evoke that wetness, whether it was the sweat on the actors’ faces, or the constant rain that is always heard if not always seen in the background. It was something we thought about in every aspect of the film, especially in terms of the light, because the monsoon has this particular blue-gray light where you don't exactly know what time it is. It’s akin to Europe in the winter or how it is there generally; in India, it's not like that generally. The monsoon is particularly cloudy, and then the rest of the year is sunny. 

The mood of all the characters, being in this situation which they couldn’t find the way out of, was enhanced with the feeling of the monsoon, of everybody being stuck in this soup. We worked a lot on the mise-en-scène and on the blue colors, which for us are very typically monsoon colors. Blue plastics are always used in Mumbai to cover vegetable stands. Everything from small houses to fancy building terraces gets covered in this blue, so it becomes like the color of the monsoon.

In the second half, we wanted the season to change and to bring with it a different feeling of light, because light can change your mood and how you feel. Having this bleached-out light of the countryside, the dappled light through the leaves, to create a yellowish glow, in our minds, enhances the feeling for the second half, which goes into a fable state. The red color of the earth is typical to that landscape of Ratnagiri, so we wanted to also bring that out as much as we could.

In the film you pay tribute to Sister Lovely, a nurse from Kerala who looked after your grandmother, and to your grandmother herself. You’ve depicted the experience of nurses in Mumbai before, in your short film “Afternoon Clouds,” but can you tell me about what compelled you to focus on the lives of nurses in this film?

I was spending a lot of time in a hospital at the time, and I was thinking a lot about what it is to be a nurse and to not be allowed to show any emotion while doing your job. It can be quite a nerve-wracking job, but you have to be as shielded as possible from showing any of those emotions. My aim was to delve into the personal lives of those people who are never allowed to show their feelings. 

At the heart of your film is also this friendship between three women of different generations: the nurses Prabha and Anu, played by Malayalam actors Kani Kusruti and Divya Prabha, and hospital cook Parvaty, played by Marathi actor Chhaya Kadam. Tell me about conceiving of the elements of age, class, and especially language that threaten to divide the characters. 

Normally, in India, because of the language difference, a lot of friendships are not made, because you prefer to stick with people who speak your own language, which is  frustrating for me, because I feel that gender doesn’t become something that unites you, but there are so many other identities that come into it. Friendship between a Maharashtrian cook and a Malayali nurse may not be so common, and language is one issue in that, but so are the hierarchies within the hospital. I was keen to kind of look past those and make possible a friendship between these two people, to imagine what that could look like. 

For me, language is an important exploration. I feel, if you live in a city like Mumbai, it’s very difficult to ignore the fact that there are many languages here. It’s a quality of Mumbai that I love a lot. It creates communities but also leads to a form of alienation, because when you don’t speak the language of a place, it can get even more lonely. All these elements, I thought, would allow me to talk about what it’s like to live in a big city, with language being one of the ways you feel alienated. This was important for me to express about the city.

India has multiple film industries, and it can feel that the entire country has this profound love of cinema. You follow a scene of your characters at the movies with a scene of them attending Workers Unity meetings together. Can you discuss the role of cinema in shaping not only the popular but also the political imagination of India?

I didn’t really think of this connection. [laughs] But now that you say it, I do agree with you. I’ve always felt that the cinema is a space that allows me to experience a private catharsis in the company of others. That’s the one aspect of going to a cinema that I love the most, and I felt that it was synonymous with how the city is; it’s alienation when you are in the company of many people. You are not physically alone, but you are still lonely. The cinema embodies that as well; it’s a collective, but it’s also just you and the screen. This is an aspect of cinema that I really love, which is why more people should keep going to the cinema. 

That protest juxtaposed with it is a protest that has been still going on in Mumbai about housing. I wanted there to be some kind of hope Parvaty has that all is not lost, that she could perhaps come back and fight this case with the others who are going to take joint action against it. It was important for me that it didn't become this very hopeless space for Parvaty. Going back to the village is not a very good life, either. It was a feeling that Parvaty’s life in Mumbai had not ended, and that she could come back.

There’s such romance to this film; your focus on bodies is both tactile and dreamlike, as in “A Night of Knowing Nothing” as well. Can you discuss this exploration of sensual existence and the prominence of this within your work?

It’s an element of filmmaking that I really like. For me, romance is a political choice. To look through the gaze of romance allows us to have a world of light. And that is something that is worth working hard to keep. It’s maybe a naive thing, but I feel that the juxtaposition of something so beautiful, so lovely, and so vulnerable as romance along with the reality of how things are, especially in India, which is becoming a country that is more and more anti-romance, conveys the complexity of love. I feel that this juxtaposition perhaps creates discourse of why love is political. Love is an aspect of the current; both in “A Night of Knowing Nothing” and “All We Imagine as Light,” talking about love becomes a way to talk about a lot of other political ideas. I use romance, as silly and naive as it may be, as a way to camouflage this.

“All We Imagine As Light” opened theatrically in New York and Los Angeles on Nov. 15 and will expand nationwide in subsequent weeks, via Sideshow and Janus Films.