all-we-imagine-as-light-shines-at-cannes

One of the final main competition titles to premiere at the 77th Cannes Film Festival is "All We Imagine as Light" by Payal Kapadia. The film has quickly become a frontrunner for the Palme d’Or.

 

No Indian female director has ever competed for Cannes’ top prize, and no filmmaker from the country has won the coveted award.

 

The film has received universal acclaim from critics at the festival, which is set to conclude later today. It's a captivating and masterfully crafted drama portraying the experiences of three women in Mumbai, a city with which they have complex relationships. The film has put India on the brink of making history.

 

Kapadia, along with her four principal actors (Kani Kusruti, Divya Prabha, Hridhu Haroon, and Chhaya Kadam), cinematographer Ranabir Das, and producers Thomas Hakim of Petit Chaos and Zico Maitra of Chalk and Cheese, addressed critics at the festival’s press conference hall on Friday morning.

 

Critics have heaped unstinted press on the film. BBC described "All We Imagine as Light" as “universal and emotional enough to hypnotise anyone who has been alone in a city or been spellbound by a film on the subject.” “Just two films into her young career, Kapadia has established her rare talent for finding passages of exquisite poetry within the banal blank verse of everyday Indian life,” wrote Variety’s Jessica Kiang.

 

Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian wrote: “Kapadia’s storytelling has something of Satyajit Ray’s 'The Big City' (Mahanagar) and 'Days and Nights in the Forest' (Aranyer Din Ratri); it is so fluent and absorbing.”  But truth be told, "All We Imagine as Light" is a true-blue original, a remarkably individualistic film that has sprung from the mind – and heart – of a writer-director who astutely and spontaneously blends her innate humanism with a phenomenal grasp of control over craft.

 

“The title is also about hope," Kapadia said at the press meet. "When things are looking a bit bleak sometimes, and you don’t know whether there is a way out, you imagine there might be a light somewhere down the line.” But "All We Imagine as Light" isn’t the kind of film that holds out false hope even as it celebrates the tenacity of the characters. “When the characters are stuck in darkness, they cannot imagine light; they cannot see the possibility,” she said.

 

But just as much as "All We Imagine as Light" focuses on Mumbai's rains, nights, and traffic, it also embraces the serenity and melancholy of the seaside village to which the three women travel.