Over the course of 2024, Payal Kapadia has stamped her name in the world of movies with her film All We Imagine As Light. The film began its journey at Cannes Film Festival, where it won the Grand Prix, and from there on, there has been no turning back for the film, as it kept on winning awards from Asia Pacific Screen Awards to New York Film Critics Circle to Sight and Sound and many many more. It also made it to the Former US President Barak Obama’s list of top movies of the year.
The film and Payal were also nominated for the Golden Globe this year Best Foreign Language film and Best Director category, but lost out to Emilia Pérez and Brady Corbet for The Brutalist respectively.
In an exclusive interview with ETimes, the talented director opened up about if one could see her directing a commercial film and not an indie film now and she says , “ What is indie, what is mainstream .. they are all shifting lines? The word indie for me comes from how you raise money to make the film. For All We Imagine As Light, I didn’t go to a studio. But at the end of day it is a film – one can only hope that people go to see it , they like it .”
The film has been released in India by Rana Daggubati’s company and over the past few weeks Payal had taken to Twitter interacting with the audience members about cinema halls where they film was not shown in the right aspect ratio to in which cities the film can be shown. It was released first in Kerala in order to make sure the film meets the deadline to represent India at the Oscars for the official film from the country but lost out to Laapataa Ladies.
Payal also shared that being the distributor Rana never asked for any changes in the film. One is often told to add or delete things from a film to make it more saleable, but Rana didn’t do any such thing. Payal said, “ That is the reason we went with Spirit , they didn’t want to change the vision of the film , they were going with the point that this is your film , let us try to do our best to put it out to the world , let us find a way for that and I think is a very international way of distribution mindset.”
The film starred Chhaya Kadam, Divya Prabha and Kani Kusruti.
