- Wednesday, March 12, 2025
By: India Weekly
FILMMAKER Payal Kapadia’s latest film, “All We Imagine As Light”, releasing on November 22, delves into the experiences of two Malayali nurses navigating life in Mumbai.
Kapadia, known for her poetic approach to storytelling, said the film employs sound and literary dialogue to convey the inner lives of its characters.
“I believe cinema can sometimes be closer to poetry than prose,” she explained in an interview with PTI.
The film, which won the prestigious Grand Prix award at Cannes in May, centres on the lives of Prabha (Kani Kusruti) and Anu (Divya Prabha), two nurses who share an apartment in the city.
Prabha’s routine is disrupted when she receives a package from her estranged husband, while Anu faces challenges finding privacy to spend time with her boyfriend in Mumbai’s crowded landscape.
Adding to the narrative, Prabha’s friend Parvati (Chhaya Kadam), a widow, is at risk of losing her home due to pressures from property developers.
Kapadia described her approach to character introspection through sound, which she sees as a powerful tool to express emotions that cannot easily be visualized.
“There are many paths to it. Filmmakers have done it through light, image, and all sorts of things, but the way I like to do it is through sound,” she said.
Drawing from Indian film traditions, she uses subjective soundscapes to depict the characters’ inner worlds, allowing the audience to hear what the characters feel.
Kapadia, 38, studied at St. Xavier’s and Sophia College in Mumbai before joining the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII). She credits her family and her mother, artist Nalini Malani, for her exposure to the arts, though she briefly considered a different path, even studying economics before finally choosing film.
The filmmaker, who has previously explored themes of romance and poetry in her short Afternoon Clouds and documentary A Night of Knowing Nothing, now focuses on how changes in cities like Mumbai impact ordinary people.
“Public spaces are taken away, their housing is taken away, and then it becomes expensive to live in. These questions about Mumbai really bother me,” she said.
Kapadia is eager for audience feedback as the film heads into theatres, marking her first theatrical release.
“For any filmmaker, it is a dream and it is my first film to release theatrically,” she said, reflecting on the journey of creating and sharing her work with the public.
