Interview: Payal Kapadia on Capturing a City’s Contradictions in ‘All We Imagine as Light’

Few films have exposed the hollowness of the Oscars’ selection process for Best International Feature quite like writer-director Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine as Light. The film marked India’s first feature to play in the Cannes Film Festival’s Official Competition in three decades, yet the country’s selection committee went in another direction with their choice in the category. “The jury said that they were watching a European film taking place in India,” a representative said, “not an Indian film taking place in India.”

Such a statement proves the necessity of Kapadia’s city symphony, which harmonizes the tales of three women from different backgrounds. The core dynamic of the film is the relationship between two colleagues and roommates—Prabha (Kani Kusruti), the stoic head nurse at a Mumbai hospital, and her energetic new hire, Anu (Divya Prabha)—as such cohabitation in the urban core of one of the world’s most densely populated cities makes them acutely aware of shared struggles and opposing outlooks. Along with the recently widowed Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam), a colleague experiencing a more acute sense of displacement as she stares down eviction, the trio’s travails provide a wide-ranging look at life in contemporary India.

Drawing from her background in documentary filmmaking, Kapadia portrays contemporary Mumbai in rich detail. All We Imagine as Light, her first narrative feature, contextualizes the women’s stories against a broader tapestry of a population struggling and striving together. Especially in its back half, when the characters venture into the countryside for a period of extended reflection, the film confers on the narrative both specificity and universality.

“Especially both in the U.S. and in India,” Kapadia told me shortly after her stateside arrival to present All We Imagine as Light at the New York Film Festival, “we are being divided so much by issues of identity and looking at the other without having any kind of empathy.” Our conversation, just like her film, overflowed with compassion and care as she described the various processes that gave the project such humanity.

There’s such care in the construction of the interstitial scenes. Other filmmakers might have just used B-roll or stock footage, but you spotlight images and voices of everyday people. Was that approach inspired by your documentary work?

Yeah, it certainly was. While writing the script itself, I worked very closely with my DoP, Ranabir Das. We would go out and shoot with a small camera and observe the city. It’s really good that you have collaborators who are willing to give you this kind of time. While shooting, we were trying to come up with a language for the film and to shoot the city. We were just doing that for one or two years whenever we got the chance, in the monsoon and scenes like this. While doing that, we decided on the documentary feeling the first part would have.

We took some time out with the camera to take these shots traveling through the city because sometimes we didn’t get permission to put this big camera in the car. It was important for me to shoot the market that you see in the first few shots, which is a wholesale market that happens between four and seven [in the morning]. It’s very quintessentially Mumbai to shoot there, [just as it was] in what we call the ladies’ compartment of the train.

Are the voices we hear scripted dialogue, or were you interviewing real people?

When I was writing the script, I interviewed a lot of people. [I then] went through the interviews and weaned out elements that worked well to introduce the story. I took lines and gave them to new people who had similar experiences, and said, “How do you respond to what this person has said in a more precise way?” It was like Chinese whispers, the game where you pass it on. It was a specific idea that I was planting, but the response I got was a little bit more directed.

You’ve talked about being inspired by Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and I can’t help but see a connection to the exquisite corpse idea he used in his first film.

That’s true! When I was in film school, I did my thesis project on Mysterious Object at Noon and Miguel Gomes’s Our Beloved Month of August. These two films use fiction and nonfiction so amazingly, and they freed my mind [around] the limitations of form.

You’ve likened your films to patchwork quilts. Is All We Imagine as Light your way of keeping some of that texture?

I love working in a way as if I’m making films on my kitchen table, just stitching together seemingly unrelated forms, ideas, texts, and music in a very organic way.

There are many declarations about what Mumbai is or represents by the people within it. Are there any that speak more for your perspective than others? For example, is it a city of dreams or a city of illusions?

It’s hard to say one without the other, because, for me, it’s that contradiction that creates the city. I have a love/hate relationship with it. It’s a city that gives a lot of opportunities, especially for women. Compared to other parts of the country, it’s a bit more free and possible in a city like Mumbai to walk around as a woman alone. So that’s one side that I appreciate, but it promises you a lot more than it gives you. And it’s quite painful to be able to live every day and just earn to live. It’s just a cycle that’s true of a lot of big cities, I imagine.

How much of what the characters feel is the routine isolation and impermanence that anyone who lives in a big city feels, and how much of it is particular to Mumbai?

Language was important for me to explore because in Mumbai you get people from all over the country, and we speak a lot of different languages in India. We really don’t understand each other. When you go on the train in Mumbai, you’ll hear all these different languages, like Tamil, Malayalam, Gujarati, and Mangali. When I’m walking on the street in New York, I hear so many different languages, and I get excited if I hear a language I know. Language is interesting because it can do two things. One is that, like for the doctor, it’s very alienating that he doesn’t speak the main language of the city, which is Hindi. It’s really hard for him to learn, and that can make you feel much lonelier because you don’t have friends and it’s hard to communicate. The daily struggle of language is a big thing. But it’s also a way to create intimacy and privacy, because if you and I speak a language that no one else understands, we can say a whole lot of funny stuff. [laughs]

Does that lack of cohesion around language in India inform how you shoot communication? Does it make people less likely to express themselves verbally?

I think in India, what happens is that you tend to gravitate toward people from the same region, as you speak the same language. We form networks like this, which is why, in the film, it was important for me that Parvaty, the older cook, isn’t from the same region as the two women. She’s from Maharashtra. Normally, this would not be a friendship that would happen very easily because language comes in the way. But I wanted to create a world where these friendships are also possible [to show] what could they possibly lead to.

What are we to make of the fact that Prabha and Anu can give themselves over to their feelings so differently when they’re outside of Mumbai? Do you think a city constructs a different sense of self?

It certainly does, and I was also interested in the feeling that time has in the two spaces. That’s why we take holidays and why vacation is important for everyone! Especially in jobs like [those in] the health industry, it’s very difficult to take time off. This holiday was forced time out because their friend was leaving, and they had to take this trip. When you’re working in Mumbai, you spend two hours to get to work, and then you spend your whole day working. Then, you take two hours to come back, and then you have to cook your dinner, eat, and wash your clothes, so there’s no [free] time. What’s self-reflection in this space? And what’s reflecting on your situation in a place where the feeling of time is so different? I felt that this could be a way to explore intimate feelings where the city doesn’t allow them to take place.

Is that part of why you shot so much footage of the characters when they’re in transit? So often we think of trains as just what takes us from point A to point B, but in that period, that’s where they can reflect.

Absolutely, I find trains also very cinematic. They feel like film strips going across. I’m a bit old school. Celluloid has [sprocket holes] like little windows of the train.

I mean, the first film is of a train, so, it’s tied into the history of the medium!

Wow! Yeah, that’s true, The Arrival of a Train.

You touched on how the documentary-style camerawork was tied to the screenwriting, but I also read that some of these techniques you employed were born out of necessity whenever you didn’t get the permits to shoot in the city. Did you also find that the style complimented some of the themes of the film as well?

We consciously thought about how to shoot non-verbal communication, gestures, small movements, and nuances beyond dialogue to express certain feelings. I don’t know who said this, but I have a feeling it was Chantal Akerman who said, “Shoot fiction like non-fiction and non-fiction like fiction.” The actors themselves, the little micro-expressions that you get, it’s like documenting a person. Life gives us so many more possibilities than I could ever imagine.

Does that mean that you’re shooting a lot more footage than you need, as if you were shooting a documentary? Or are you precise enough to know what you need in order to shape the film in the edit?

I did shoot a lot, much to the disappointment of my producers! But one thing that I did do, before shooting for three weeks with the actresses, [was stay together with them] and [film] every scene in many ways. We documented [them] with a small camera, like preparing for a theater play, so that everybody contributes to the character the way they see it. Then, we did a lot of accepting and rejecting of ideas, and we worked in this way where we analyzed what we shot. Even the DoP was there at the end, and there was a lot of collaboration of this kind, which for me is a very nice way to work—especially if you have generous artists like I had in the film. A lot of the documentation part was pre-done over these weeks that we lived and worked together, and then a lot of it was taking from that material and putting it into the film.

Did this collaboration change or shape the film in any way?

Actually, in the relationship between the three women. I realized while doing these that they were so incredible together that I added some scenes where they are all actually spending more time together and creating a lighter moment in the second half.

You said you learned, while working on A Night of Knowing Nothing, about recognizing the discrimination within one’s own movement. Did that inform the depiction of the divides between generations of women in this film? They can be so caring to each other, but they also have blind spots.

I find myself to be sometimes a messy feminist! That was something that I was addressing in the film in a more self-reflexive way. It took me six years to [finish writing the film], so I think I went from being closer to Anu’s age to Prabha’s age. I felt myself responding to women of different ages that I met with, sometimes thinking to myself, “Why did I think like this? Where does this response come from?” It’s something that really bothered me and made me upset with myself, and I was trying to address some of those things and to be a little bit kinder to people whose worldview I don’t always believe or accept. For example, the character of Prabha, normally I would feel very judged by a person like this, and I would be critical of her choices. But I think the film has taught me a bit more to be empathetic toward people, what they’ve gone through, and why they behave the way they do. That was important for me.

The nature of Prabha’s character is that she’s part mother, part friend, and part spouse to Anu. How were you and Kani Kusuruti working through some of the ambiguities of this complicated woman?

I was thinking a lot about this idea of friendship. In our discussions, we realized that the roles of a family—like sisters, brothers, mothers, and fathers—are very well defined to us. Throughout history in our socializing, we have come to say that this is what this [role] means, and we understand when a character is flawed [in comparison to] those norms that we know. But a friendship is a very open relationship. We can be various degrees of friends, and our friendship will be defined by how you and I want to be friends. And that gives a lot of scope to add this mother figure, this slightly nosy person, and somebody who’s a bit manipulative or lying at times. It’s a very interesting relationship to explore because it’s so open.

You introduce a more explicit political dimension with the workers’ unity meeting. Why was it important to weave this view of activism into the fabric of the film?

I wanted the story of Parvaty not [to be] one where hope is lost. There’s a feeling that she could come back because this collective exists, and unions have been a strong part of Mumbai’s history. The mills that her husband used to work for shut down when there were these two-year-long mill workers’ strikes in the ’80s, and a lot of men lost their jobs. It was women like Parvaty who stepped up to take care of their families, and they had this no-nonsense attitude: “I can’t sit here and feel sorry for myself, I have to get on with it.” I wanted to pay brief tribute to the history of a city that’s historically had a lot of unions and collectives of this kind, which I think are getting more and more marginalized now. But it’s what defines a lot of Mumbai.

How did you approach sexuality in the film? The scene of Anu finally getting to consummate her pent-up desire is edited with an almost Cubist feeling about it.

There are only four shots! [laughs] I wanted the scene to be very loving, but also very sexual. I had to think about how to find this balance, and it’s really about Anu’s experience because this is what she’s wanted. But [after], she has a different feeling toward this moment in her life.

Costuming in contemporary cinema is often more practical than expressive. Was there a consideration for how the blue nurse uniforms make Prabha and Anu fade into the color palette of Mumbai during monsoon season?

I’m so happy you asked about costumes. Nobody’s asked me about costumes, and I think a lot about them! They take up so much of the frame. We thought a lot about the blue, and we had a really great costume designer [Maxima Basu]. We said blue, and she brought me something like 45 swatches of blue. We got into a long debate as to which blue it would be.

There’s a particular blue feeling to Mumbai in the rain. Everything gets covered by a blue plastic, which you also see in different shots in the film. The terraces are sometimes covered with this very in-your-face blue. I was very interested in making traditionally not very beautiful colors still feel nice, and somehow finding beauty in that as well. Magenta and purple are also two colors that are a bit tricky to work with, but they’re very much part of Indian life.

And does the nature of wearing a uniform affect the characters, too?

It’s true, the uniform was actually one of the reasons that interested me about the space of the hospital. It makes everybody the same, but there’s a lot of complexity and individualism in each person that’s not supposed to be seen. You’re not supposed to have any feelings, or you’re not supposed to show them. You have to be strong, and it’s what the nursing training is teaching them. But there’s a whole other universe inside which is complex and colorful.

Late in the film, Anu says, “The future is here and I don’t feel prepared for it.” Could she also be speaking for Mumbai given how often your camera is capturing cranes and construction all across the city?

One of the bigger metaphors was of a work in progress. In fact, at the beginning of the film when Prabha opens the curtain, you see the reflection of the city in construction. This is something that I felt about all the characters. They’re all a work in progress. The change that moves us forward is one of the themes in the film. It’s all connected to this theme of work in progress as the city, and our sensibilities are in a state of flux.