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IMAGE: Director Payal Kapadia, with cast members Chhaya Kadam, Hridhu Haroon, Divya Prabha and Kani Kusruti pose on the red carpet before the screening of the film All We Imagine as Light in competition at the Cannes Film Festival. Photograph: Yara Nardi/Reuters
Filmmaker Payal Kapadia and the cast of All We Imagine As Light shone bright at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival as they took to the red carpet ahead of the film’s history-making screening here.
Kapadia’s feature directorial debut, which screened on Thursday night and has received glowing reviews in the international media, is the first Indian film in 30 years and the first ever by an Indian female director to be screened in the main competition of the prestigious film gala.
Kapadia and the film’s cast members Kani Kusruti, Divya Prabha, Chhaya Kadam and Hridhu Haroon were beaming with energy and did a little dance as they posed for the shutterbugs at the Cannes red carpet.
IMAGE: Payal Kapadia, Chhaya Kadam, Hridhu Haroon, Divya Prabha, Kani Kusruti, Cinematographer Ranabir Das, Producers Thomas Hakim and Julien Graff, Co-Producer Zico Maitra. Photograph: Yara Nardi/Reuters
They were accompanied by Cinematographer Ranabir Das, and producers Julien Graff, Zico Maitra, Thomas Hakim.
The scene inside the Grand Theatre Lumiere, where the film had its premiere, echoed the mood outside as Payal and her team received an overwhelming welcome from the audience members.
The screening culminated with an eight minute standing ovation for the film.
The fiction feature All We Imagine as Light follows two nurses (Kani Kusruti and Divya Prabha) from Kerala, who are room-mates in Mumbai.
At the film gala, All We Imagine as Light, also written by Kapadia, competes for the Palme d’Or alongside 19 other highly anticipated titles, including films from master directors Francis Ford Coppola (Megalopolis), Yorgos Lanthimos (Kinds of Kindness), Paul Schrader (Oh, Canada), David Cronenberg (The Shrouds) and Andrea Arnol (Bird).
The last Indian film to be selected for the main competition was Shaji N Karun’s 1994 movie Swaham.
IMAGE: Director Payal Kapadia, with Chhaya Kadam, Hridhu Haroon, Divya Prabha and Kani Kusruti dance on the red carpet. Photograph: Yara Nardi/Reuters
All We Imagine as Light, a Malayalam-Hindi feature, is about Prabha, a nurse, who receives an unexpected gift from her long estranged husband that throws her life into disarray. Her younger room-mate, Anu, tries in vain to find a private spot in the big city to be alone with her boyfriend.
One day the two nurses go on a road trip to a beach town where the mystical forest becomes a space for their dreams to manifest, according to the plotline. International critics have given the film a thumbs up and praised Kapadia’s storytelling prowess.
In his review, Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian newspaper in Britain called the film ‘glorious’, highlighting its ‘freshness and emotional clarity’ as well as ‘enriching humanity and gentleness’, while also comparing the movie to Satyajit Ray’s Mahanagar and Aranyer Din Ratri.
Praising the movie as ‘a light for audiences to surrender to, a realist-infused story’, Fionnuala Halligan of Screen International said Kapadia’s storytelling had all the elements of international giants like Lucrecia Martel or Alice Rohrwacher and Wong Kar-wai.
Indiewire’s Sophie Monks Kaufman hailed the movie as a ‘sensual triumph’. ‘This casual everyday vignette is brimming with a sensuality (the rain, the clothes, the food, the women) that people don’t tend to notice when caught up in the rhythm of life,’ she wrote.
An alumna of the Film and Television Institute of India, Kapadia is best known for her acclaimed documentary A Night of Knowing Nothing, which premiered at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival’s Director’s Fortnight side-bar where it won the Oeil d’or (Golden Eye) award.
Her short film Afternoon Clouds was screened in Cinefondation, a category dedicated to supporting next generation of talented film-makers.
All We Imagine As Light is an Indo-French co-production between Petit Chaos from France and Chalk and Cheese Films from India.
