IFFK 2024: A homecoming for Payal Kapadia and the crew of All We Imagine As Light

A sense of homecoming was in the air at the 29th International Film Festival of Kerala (IFFK) when filmmaker Payal Kapadia and her crew visited the festival venues. It almost was like the return home of a Malayali filmmaker after winning accolades the world over for her debut film All We Imagine as Light, beginning with the Grand Prix at Cannes.

Just like her film which had the migrant outsiders of Mumbai in a warm embrace, the audience at the IFFK seemed to view her as one of their own, for it was here that the film’s early planning began when Payal came with her documentary A Night of Knowing Nothing at the International Documentary and Short Film Festival of Kerala (IDSFFK).

“I feel like it is a Malayalam movie. It was also marketed as a Malayalam movie with the title Prabhayay Ninachathellam. I still feel it could have done much better in the cinemas here, if not for competition from the big movies,” says Ms. Kapadia in an interview to The Hindu on Wednesday. She is at the festival to receive the Spirit of Cinema Award.

The film, an ode to outsiders of the Mumbai city like Malayali nurses Prabha (Kani Kusruti) and Anu (Divya Prabha), and Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam), a rural Maharashtrian employed at the hospital they are working in, has a good part of the dialogues in Malayalam, thanks to the work of Robin Joy, the co-dialogue writer and associate director.

“The two of us worked for two years. It was a long process involving him translating my original screenplay to Malayalam, and then back to English and constantly rewriting every line. Every film has its own tone and every filmmaker has his/her own language. I was trying to find that for myself,” says Ms. Kapadia.

She says that the initial story was about two women who come to Mumbai for work and the conflict in their friendship because they have two different worldviews.

“I felt that all the contradictions that I wanted to talk about in the film came out better if I went with the nursing profession. As nurses , you have to be very professional, there are so many people emoting all the time in front of you and you have to just take that and have to be very hard. I was interested in having this contradiction of a woman who was suffering so much inside but feels she cannot show it to the outside world and the only time she actually cries is in the cinema hall. And as we know, Malayalis are a very large part of the nursing community. So I thought of taking this as a challenge to make the movie in Malayalam. We thought that not speaking the dominant language of that place was important. I was feeling very maverick back then, but later on when I had to translate, it was tough,” she says.

The audience at a conversation Payal Kapadia had with IFFK deputy director H. Shaji and IAS officer Divya S. Iyer at the International Film Festival of Kerala in Thiruvananthapuram on Wednesday.
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SPECIAL ARRANGEMENT

Sitting beside her, cinematographer Ranabir Das, the person behind the very blue Mumbai nights and the warm rural Maharashtra in the second half of the film, talks about his approach to the film’s imagery.

“In pre-production we tried a lot of things, including the lensing, to achieve a look of some amount of kindness and proximity with the characters. As for the colours, we wanted it to feel distinctly different in the two parts. In the first, we wanted the city to continuously spill into the narrative, whether it is a train in the background or something else. We also exaggerated the blue a little bit to enhance the feeling of overcast monsoon. The other is a more personal space with the not-so-pleasant warmth of the sun, the red soil and the greens becoming the palette,” says Mr. Das.

The film critiques the much romanticised notion of the ‘Spirit of Mumbai’ heard after every calamity, as something which ignores the plight of the lesser privileged. Ms. Kapadia infuses a lyrical quality to even the mundane moments, although the endlessly romanticised Mumbai rains is thoughtfully turned into a frustrating hindrance to a romantic encounter.

Payal Kapadia
| Photo Credit:
S.R. Praveen

“It is something that I get very annoyed about that we are always saying this Spirit of Mumbai and actually we see that it is actually not a spirit because people have no choice but to get on with their lives. I felt that the city is unjust in so many ways and we are calling it a spirit. Of course the city is better than several parts of India where there is no opportunity at all, but we should have some systems in place to protect the rights of people who live there. Mumbai is a city made up of people who are not from there. I wanted to remember that about the city while making this film,” says Ms. Kapadia.

She makes it clear that she had to bring in some kind of subtlety into writing the film, especially the inter-religious relationship of Anu and Shiaz, while at the same time leaving a leeway to attract the mainstream audience.

“I wanted to clear the Censor Board. I was very keen that the film was released. The most crucial thing was that I didn’t want to make a festival film, but a film that people can watch in the cinemas, because if you do it then you have to make the cuts. Then it was also a way. You don’t make that the highlight, but people come and you can present an argument to them maybe and sneak in your idea as thoughts into it. I also didn’t want to reduce their relationship to their immediate identities. Our culture should not be about that, especially in personal life,” says Ms. Kapadia.

About the inspired musical choices, especially the use of the piano tunes by the Ethiopian nun Emahoy Tsegue-Maryam Guebrou, she says that she likes to work with music in a very intuitive way. “I am like a squirrel that collects all the different music and uses it intuitively in the scenes. Emahoy herself was a migrant in exile. I felt it had a touch of western jazz but it also uses the pentatonic scale which is very much our musical scale,” she says.

On the whole journey from being arrested during the student protests at the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) to being celebrated now the world over for her film, she says that there are many other protest leaders who should get recognition. “People are making me into some kind of hero because of all the external attention that I get, but actually there are many more people who do a lot more work than I do. They should be the ones recognised for the stand that they take. I think it’s important that we remember the true narrative, which is that public institutions have given us a great deal of things and supported filmmakers like me and so many people from JNU and other places, which are all public-funded. They have given us wings and we cannot put down public institutions. I cannot be here if not for the world’s public institutions,” says Ms. Kapadia.