All We Imagine as Light is a delicate, intimate exploration of three women’s lives in Mumbai that has stirred up a surprising amount of controversy on the global cinema scene. Director Payal Kapadia’s narrative debut premiered to raves at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, winning the competition’s Grand Jury Prize (second place) after being acquired for US release by Sideshow and Janus films, the distributor responsible for the Oscar-winning phenomenon Drive My Car. All We Imagine seemed like a slam dunk for India to receive its first international-film Oscar nod in over 20 years. For that to happen, though, India would need to submit the film to represent its country at the awards.
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It did not. The Film Federation of India, which similarly overlooked the smash hit RRR two years ago, instead chose Laapataa Ladies, a well-received if far broader comedy from filmmaker Kiran Rao. “The jury said that they were watching a European film taking place in India, not an Indian film taking place in India,” FFI president Ravi Kottarakara recently told The Hollywood Reporter India. In other words, the uniquely, thrillingly global nature of All We Imagine is what prevented it from being able to compete for one of world cinema’s most prestigious awards.
“It was nice to be considered, but it was also nice that a really good film got selected,” Kapadia tells me in her first interview since India announced its submission. “But the world is moving beyond these national boundaries. It would be nice if we embrace having a more open idea to cinema, where it’s not bound by its country, but more of a cinematic language or something that is connectable by everyone.” The Oscars’ current system, she adds, is “a bit archaic in my view.”
The case of All We Imagine (watch the exclusive trailer above) spotlights how the Academy has struggled to meet a globalizing film scene where it is. Kapadia financed her gorgeous but subtle drama by looking outside her home country, where star-driven Bollywood spectacle still rules the day. “You don’t see so much independent cinema from India traveling and being seen around the world,” Kapadia says. “And if you see the kind of films being made in India, it’s mostly not women’s stories.”
While still in her final year of film school, she teamed up with the Paris-based producing team of Thomas Hakim and Julien Graff to make her movie, leading France to actually consider submitting All We Imagine for the Oscars before India even had a chance to weigh in. Such a choice would not have been out of bounds: This year, Germany’s Oscar selection is the polemical The Seed of the Sacred Fig, helmed by dissident filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof. That film’s scathing critique of modern Iran essentially ensured that Iran itself wouldn’t choose Sacred Fig to represent the nation at the Oscars; Germany was able to step in given its stake in the movie, with Rasoulof having been living there since fleeing his home country.
All We Imagine was not so lucky to find an Oscar savior, despite being in a similar—if less fraught—position. France went instead with Emilia Pérez, a Spanish-language musical drama set in Mexico. Not exactly hyperlocal, either.
Kapadia was born in Mumbai, but moved away for boarding school to Andhra Pradesh before returning as an adult. These days, her relationship to the city of 12.5 million people is rather complicated. “I’ve seen the gentrification of the city change in a very violent way. People who’ve lived there for years have had displacement and been moved to very, very far away parts of the city. It’s nothing like it used to be,” she says. “I was at a certain age, a lot of my friends were also moving to Mumbai, and I wondered, How it is to negotiate a city like Mumbai today, as working women?”
The characters in All We Imagine express their ambition and consider their escape as they hold onto fading marriages and jump into blossoming romances. To execute her luminous character study, Kapadia, a self-described cinephile, searched far beyond national borders. She found great inspiration in the way a few great female directors approached their own cities, specifically Chantal Akerman in her avant-garde doc News From Home and Agnès Varda’s formal hybrid Cléo From 5 to 7. “I wanted to see how I could apply that to Mumbai as well—to be more documentary, to not have a big camera that makes it difficult to shoot in certain areas, but just going into the city without a purpose,” Kapadia says. “People can relate to it in this way with their own cultural context.”
This goes particularly for All We Imagine’s focus on Indian women. “Especially from South Asian countries, there’s not much of a vocabulary for women to express desire—and if you don’t have words to do it, cinema is a way,” Kapadia says. “I really feel very free in cinema.” She points to All We Imagine’s protagonist, Prabha (Kani Kusruti), whose prickly but vivid internal life challenged even her portrayer. “When we started making the film, Kani said, ‘My God, this character—why is she like this? I would never get along with her,’” Kapadia says. “For me, I wanted to have a more empathetic view.”
That this movie marked India’s first Cannes competition entry in decades spoke volumes. And even if unable to qualify for the international-feature Oscar, the movie’s richness and originality stand out among this year’s larger contending crop. All We Imagine deserves to still compete for top awards as last year’s Anatomy of a Fall did. That film was snubbed by France in favor of a seemingly more local choice in The Taste of Things, before going on to an Oscar nod for best picture and a win for best original screenplay.
Sure, there’s some European DNA in All We Imagine As Light. But that’s what allowed Kapadia to depict Mumbai with such specificity and genuine emotion. She sees her film as part of a shift for Indian filmmakers. “We’re part of a community that’s growing. Our cinema is traveling everywhere—and it’s not just Bollywood or mainstream cinema, but a lot of smaller films,” she says. It may be the Oscars, then, who wind up missing out.
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