Payal Kapadia, director of 'All We Imagine as Light': 'In India, independent cinema no longer has the support of the state' (2025)

"With a videographer mother and a psychoanalyst father, I could only be a filmmaker!" said Payal Kapadia, 38, bursting with laughter. The Indian director of All We Imagine as Light, Grand Prix winner at Cannes, a portrait of three women in transit captured in an extraordinary chromatic palette, astonishes with her vitality. Born in Bombay in 1986, she first came to prominence with A Night of Knowing Nothing (2021), a searing essay on militant youth, which was selected at Cannes' Directors Fortnight and won the Œil d'Or award for best documentary. Her next film is already on the way, she told us: "It's going to be a comedy!"

Did 'A Night of Knowing Nothing,' which denounced the takeover of universities by Narendra Modi's Hindu nationalist government, get you into trouble?

The film was not distributed in India, like most documentaries in my native country. Certainly, it circulated a lot in festivals, and it was screened in film clubs and galleries in India. But it didn't carry much weight, compared to all the propaganda films supported by the government, true blockbusters conveying false ideas, notably Islamophobic. I remember one scenario with a Muslim character who had 12 wives. At Cannes, in May, the Indian pavilion presented a few works of this kind.

Are these propaganda films successful in India?

Yes, because they're very well-produced. People get into the stories that much better, which is problematic. At the International Film Festival of India in Goa in 2022, filmmaker Nadav Lapid, who chaired the jury, triggered a diplomatic incident when, at the closing ceremony, he deplored the presence in competition of Vivek Agnihotri's The Kashmir Files [which revisits, with a number of inaccuracies, the exodus of Hindus from Kashmir in the 1990s, under pressure from Muslim extremists].

'All We Imagine as Light' is a portrait of the inhospitable city of Bombay. Your female characters go there in search of freedom, while at the same time denying themselves certain things.

Bombay is a paradoxical city. It may be easier to find work, but the days are long and there is little social regulation. The character of Parvaty, a cook and undocumented immigrant, lives in a building threatened with destruction, on the site of the old cotton mills. In the past, workers used to live there as a community, then the workshops closed, giving way to shopping centers. I'm not saying that these workers' homes were comfortable, but these people had to leave the city.

Bombay is the capital of Hindi cinema, known as Bollywood. A lot of people shoot films and commercials there, which drives up prices. With cinematographer Ranabir Das, we shot a lot of documentaries at night, to keep costs down and capture the atmosphere. The market where we shot, which opens the film, takes place from 4:00 to 7:00 in the morning. Then another population arrives, executives working in offices. The skyscrapers next to the dilapidated houses are very much Bombay.

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