Payal Kapadia, 38, whose film All We Imagine as Light won the Grand Prix — the second most prestigious award at the Cannes Film Festival — sees herself as a sad person, and this sadness determines the direction of her films.
Ms. Kapadia, who hails from Mumbai and has spent much time outside the city, says she feels the change every time she visits the place. All We Imagine As Light is about Mumbai and the people who work there – people who are always in a state of change. Ms. Kapadia began working on the film with a short film in her mind, but as she became immersed in this change made up of different layers of relationships, All We Imagine As Light was born.
Ms Kapadia, an alumnus of the Pune-based Film and Television Institute of India (FTII), was part of the student protests in Indian universities in recent years and found herself living in an uncertain present.
Her first feature film, A Night of Knowing Nothing, explores the personal vulnerabilities and uncertainties faced by young Indian adults during this time. A Night of Knowing Nothing is rooted in the protests at her institution against the appointment of TV actor Gajendra Chauhan as president. During the 139-day protests in 2015, Ms Kapadia and her cinematographer Ranbir Das recorded the events unfolding around them.
Ms. Kapadia says she and her team had no clear agenda about what kind of production her film was going to be. She describes the film as a found-footage film. Following the protests at FTII, students protested at several Indian universities, including Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi and Hyderabad Central University. Ms. Kapadia says she coordinated with students from all these universities for footage and she also used CCTV footage and videos available in the public domain to put her film together. It took her almost five years to make A Night of Knowing Nothing, which progresses through letters written between students, lovers during these protests.
“If we look at the films being made in our country, you will always find someone in the crew who has been to a public institution,” Ms. Kapadia told The Hindu. “Since I was part of the strike in 2015, student protests to protect public institutions became very important to me… designed to give equal opportunities to all; A Night of Knowing Nothing was a tribute to these places.”
Ms. Kapadia evokes a sense of nostalgia that runs through her films. Not nostalgia as it is often understood, but “nostalgia for the present.” And this nostalgia for the present is evident not only in her feature films but also in her short films such as And What Is the Summer Saying and Afternoon Clouds.
Sadness and joy
“Maybe I’m a very sad person,” Ms. Kapadia said. “In A Night of Knowing Nothing, the nostalgia was for the present, when the students were standing up for themselves,” she said. But within the sadness, there’s also joy. “Even in the new film, I couldn’t escape the sadness, but there’s also joy.”
Ms. Kapadia has said she has no qualms about politics and keeps alive the feminist slogan “the personal is political” in her films, while also successfully combining it with aesthetics. But she makes a distinction between political films and propaganda films.
“Every film has its own politics, the politics of the relationship between the rich and the poor, the politics of the relationship between men and women, etc… It may or may not be the filmmaker’s intention, but it comes out. Propaganda films are not that naïve. They are very clear about what they are doing and they distort reality to present an argument aimed at changing the audience’s perspective towards a particular political narrative. For me, the difference is in the filmmaker’s intention,” Ms Kapadia said.
She has also been successful in bringing out the element of love. In And What Is the Summer Saying, the narrator narrates how his father taught him about bees, which are solitary creatures and die after mating, which was their sole purpose. Later, the narrator narrates how he discovered that his father had started thinking like bees, which must die when they are in love. Ms. Kapadia has been successful in portraying this shift in perspective, from seeing the death of a bee as the sole purpose of a lonely soul to seeing the melancholy glory of bees dying in love, in the simplest of ways to highlight the vulnerability in her filmmaking.
Still enjoying the glitz of Cannes, Ms Kapadia has shown the way forward for the Indian film industry, which had to wait 30 years for competitive representation at Cannes. And, while she says she has not yet figured out what will happen next, Ms Kapadia still has a long way to go. She hopes that from now on ‘things will be a little easier’ for her.
