One, two, three, four... encore: Grand Prix for Payal Kapadia’s ‘All We Imagine As Light’

Nonika Singh

It was not just another photo-op, but an iconic moment etched in cinematic history: four Indian women on the most coveted stage of Cannes Film Festival. Payal Kapadia’s fiction debut, ‘All We Imagine As Light’, picked up the second highest honour of the festival from Viola Davis in the presence of Greta Gerwig of ‘Barbie’ fame. As the select audience bowed to our very own Payal, the first Indian woman to win the Grand Prix, with Kani Kusruti, Chhaya Kadam and Divya Prabha in tow, the words of Kate Hodges — “Behind every great woman… is another great woman” — came to mind.

As rave reviews are summing up the film as a ‘tale of sisterhood’ and ‘a delicate triple portrait of women’, Zico Maitra, one of its co-producers, gushes, “The future is female.” What does the win mean for other indie voices, especially those of women? “It will be a game-changer,” believes Zico.

Payal, who earlier won the festival’s L’Oeil d’Or award in 2021 for her documentary ‘A Night of Knowing Nothing’, has proved that nothing is impossible. The only other Indian film to win the same honour was Chetan Anand’s ‘Neecha Nagar’ in 1946. The last one from India to make it to the competition section was Shaji Karun’s ‘Swaham’ in 1994.

As Payal breaks the 30-year jinx, the world is trying to figure out who this bundle of talent from the Film Training Institute of India (FTII) is. Reams are being written on her individualistic voice, her dare to call out the powers that be during the students’ protest at the FTII. The daughter of renowned artist Nalini Malani, she seems to have inherited the same artistic DNA. Her film’s curious title comes from one of her mother’s works.

Shivendra Singh Dungarpur, noted Indian filmmaker and producer, who worked with Payal in her formative years, feels, “She is an individual in her own right.” In fact, he realised back then that she had it in her to be counted among the world’s best.

Such high praise might seem a trifle exaggerated, but there is no denying that her distinctive cinematic language is as brilliant as it is lyrical. Kani Kusruti, who plays a Malayali nurse in the film, shares, “When Payal read out the story, there was such tenderness and poetic beauty to her vision. I was curious to know if the same would get translated on to the screen. She did not lose that charm. Her authorship came through.”

Payal’s success, she agrees, does “lead to a strong possibility for indie filmmakers to get the right producers and platform”.

Zico insists that as a producer, he wants to focus only on women-centric projects with more women at the helm as directors, producers, cinematographers, editors. “There is concrete, incontrovertible proof now that indie films can work on the highest possible levels,” he observes.

Transcending borders and language, when Payal decided to use Malayalam in the film, she did extra homework so that she didn’t miss a single note. “She worked so intensively and found all the probable words for one meaning, and knew exactly what every word meant,” recalls Kani.

She can’t say whether women directors have greater empathy for women characters as each one explores human minds in their own way, but finds the atmosphere on their sets ‘kinder and democratic’. “Even when things are falling apart, they treat the team with love and kindness, which is less on other sets,” Kani adds. Any wonder then that the actor, who has acted in series like ‘Poacher’ and ‘Killer Soup’, takes home ‘a friend in Payal’. She is rejoicing in the moment, but feels that other Indian films, such as Gurvinder Singh’s ‘Chauthi Koot’, which was in the Un Certain Regard section in 2015, also deserved the honour.

Indian women are raising the bar to another level. At the 2023 Oscars’ ceremony, Guneet Monga, producer of Kartiki Gonsalves’ ‘The Elephant Whisperers’, had beamed: “We as two women from India stood on that global stage making this historical win!” Can we manifest a similar encore from Payal next year at the Academy Awards? Zico says, “Let’s not get too ahead of ourselves,” but adds, “We have got great American distributors, Sideshow and Janus. We trust them completely on that front.”

The world is our stage… and more than one Indian woman has owned it.