IFFK 2024: A homecoming for Payal Kapadia and the crew of All We Imagine As Light

Filmmaker Payal Kapadia's journey from Cannes to IFFK, exploring themes of migration, identity, and the spirit of Mumbai.

A sense of homecoming was in the air at the 29th International Film Festival of Kerala (IFFK) when filmmaker Payal Kapadia and her crew visited the festival venues. It almost was like the return home of a Malayali filmmaker after winning accolades the world over for her debut film All We Imagine as Light, beginning with the Grand Prix at Cannes.

Just like her film which had the migrant outsiders of Mumbai in a warm embrace, the audience at the IFFK seemed to view her as one of their own, for it was here that the film’s early planning began when Payal came with her documentary A Night of Knowing Nothing at the International Documentary and Short Film Festival of Kerala (IDSFFK).

“I feel like it is a Malayalam movie. It was also marketed as a Malayalam movie with the title Prabhayay Ninachathellam. I still feel it could have done much better in the cinemas here, if not for competition from the big movies,” says Ms. Kapadia in an interview to The Hindu on Wednesday. She is at the festival to receive the Spirit of Cinema Award.

The film, an ode to outsiders of the Mumbai city like Malayali nurses Prabha (Kani Kusruti) and Anu (Divya Prabha), and Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam), a rural Maharashtrian employed at the hospital they are working in, has a good part of the dialogues in Malayalam, thanks to the work of Robin Joy, the co-dialogue writer and associate director.

“The two of us worked for two years. It was a long process involving him translating my original screenplay to Malayalam, and then back to English and constantly rewriting every line. Every film has its own tone and every filmmaker has his/her own language. I was trying to find that for myself,” says Ms. Kapadia.

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

“I felt that all the contradictions that I wanted to talk about in the film came out better if I went with the nursing profession. As nurses , you have to be very professional, there are so many people emoting all the time in front of you and you have to just take that and have to be very hard. I was interested in having this contradiction of a woman who was suffering so much inside but feels she cannot show it to the outside world and the only time she actually cries is in the cinema hall. And as we know, Malayalis are a very large part of the nursing community. So I thought of taking this as a challenge to make the movie in Malayalam. We thought that not speaking the dominant language of that place was important. I was feeling very maverick back then, but later on when I had to translate, it was tough,” she says.