IFFK 2024: Homecoming for Payal Kapadia and the crew of All We Imagine as Light

The feeling of homecoming was in the air at the 29th International Film Festival of Kerala (IFFK) as filmmaker Payal Kapadia and her team visited the festival venues. It was almost like a Malayalam filmmaker returning home after winning worldwide praise for his debut film All We Imagine as Light, which opened at the Grand Prix at Cannes.

Just like her film, which warmly embraced Mumbai’s expatriate outsiders, the IFFK audience saw her as one of their own, because it was here that the initial planning of the film began when Payal brought her documentary Were. a night of not knowing anything At the International Documentary and Short Film Festival of Kerala (IDSFFK).

“I feel like it is a Malayalam film. It was also marketed as a Malayalam film with the title Prabhayai NinachathellamI still feel that if there was no competition from big films, it could have done better in theaters here,” Ms. Kapadia said in an interview. The Hindu On Wednesday. She has come to the festival to receive the Spirit of Cinema Award.

The film has a fair share of Mumbai city outsiders like Malayali nurses Prabha (Kani Kusruti) and Anu (Divya Prabha), and Parvati (Chhaya Kadam), a rural Maharashtrian who works at the hospital where they work. . The dialogues in Malayalam, thanks to the work of co-dialogue writer and associate director Robin Joy.

“Both of us worked for two years. It was a long process that involved translating my original script into Malayalam and then back into English and rewriting every line continuously. Every film has its own tone and every filmmaker has his own language. I was trying to find it for myself,” says Ms Kapadia.

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

“I felt that the contradictions I wanted to talk about in the film would have come across better if I had gone into the nursing profession. As nurses, you have to be very professional, you have a lot of people getting emotional all the time and you have to accept that and be very tough. I was interested in this paradox of a woman who was suffering a lot inside but she felt she couldn’t show it to the outside world and she really only cried in the cinema hall. And as we know, Malayalis form a huge part of the nursing community. So I thought of taking up making a film in Malayalam as a challenge. We thought it was important not to speak the dominant language of the place. I was feeling very temperamental then, but later when I had to translate, it was difficult,” she says.

IFFK Deputy Director H. Shaji and IAS officer Divya S. at the International Film Festival of Kerala in Thiruvananthapuram on Wednesday. The audience attends Payal Kapadia’s conversation with Iyer. , Photo Credit: Special Arrangement

Sitting next to him, cinematographer Ranbir Das, the man behind the blue nights of Mumbai and warm rural Maharashtra in the second half of the film, talks about his vision of visualizing the film.

“In pre-production we tried many things, including lensing, to get the impression of some degree of kindness and closeness to the characters. As far as colors are concerned, we wanted it to look completely different in both the parts. In the first one, we wanted the city to be constantly reflected in the story, whether it was a train in the background or something else. To enhance the feel of monsoon surrounded by clouds, we have also exaggerated the blue color a bit. The other is a more personal place where the sun is not so soothingly warm, the red soil and greenery have become a colorful hue,” says Mr Das.

The film criticizes the overly romantic notion of the ‘Spirit of Mumbai’ heard after every disaster, which ignores the plight of the less privileged. Ms. Kapadia infuses even the mundane moments with a lyrical quality, though the intensely romantic Mumbai rains are thoughtfully transformed into a frustrating obstacle to a romantic encounter.

Payal Kapadia Photo Courtesy: SR Praveen

“This is something that I am very angry about is that we always call it the Spirit of Mumbai and in reality we see that it is not really a spirit because people have no choice but to move on with their lives. Is. I felt that this city was unfair in many ways and we are calling it a sentiment. Of course the city is better than many parts of India where there is no opportunity at all, but we must have some systems to protect the rights of the people living there. Mumbai is a city made up of people who are not from there. This is what I wanted to remember about the city while making this film,” says Ms Kapadia.

She makes it clear that she had to bring some kind of subtlety into writing the film, particularly Anu and Shiyaaz’s inter-religious relationship, while also leaving some leeway to appeal to a mainstream audience.

“I wanted to pass the censor board. I was very eager for the film to be released. The most important thing was that I did not want to make a festival film, but wanted to make a film that people could watch in theatres, because if you do that you have to make cuts. Then this was also a way. You don’t make it the main attraction, but people come and maybe you can present arguments to them and get your ideas in there in the form of ideas. I didn’t want to limit their relationship to their immediate identity. Our culture should not be about this, especially in personal life,” says Ms Kapadia.

Regarding inspired musical choices, particularly the use of piano melodies by Ethiopian nun Emahoy Tsegue-Mariam Guebro, she says she likes to work with music in a very intuitive way. “I’m like a squirrel who collects all the different music and uses it intuitively in the scenes. Emahoy herself was an expatriate in exile. I thought it had a touch of Western jazz, but also used the pentatonic scale, which is the scale of our music,” she says.

Talking about her entire journey from being arrested during the students’ protest at the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) to now being celebrated worldwide for her film, she says there are many other protest leaders who deserve recognition . “People are making me some kind of hero because of the outside attention I get, but in reality there are many people who do much more work than me. He should be recognized for his stance. I think it’s important that we remember the true story, which is that public institutions have given us a lot of things and supported filmmakers like me and many people at JNU and other places, all through public finance. Are nourished. They have given us wings and we cannot let public institutions down. “I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for the world’s public institutions,” Ms Kapadia says.