For Payal Kapadia — the Indian director behind Cannes Film Festival Grand Prix winner All We Imagine as Light — getting a film up is a little like running a marathon.
"It's really about looking at your feet, not looking at where you have to reach," she says.
"It's a long journey. You're just grateful for every grant you get, thinking, 'OK, now you're closer to shooting', then, when you are shooting, you still don't have enough funding and you're still trying."
The journey was so long that Kapadia managed to shoot another film — boundary-blurring documentary A Night of Knowing Nothing — in between.
But All We Imagine as Light was worth the wait.
Women and their desires
Set in the teeming throng of Mumbai and mostly shot at night, sparkling with a million lights, it's held tight on three women fighting their corner.
Kani Kusruti's level-headed nurse, Prabha, shares a spark with poetry-penning Doctor Manoj (Azees Nedumangad), but she feels unable to act on it because of her absentee husband — who went to work in Germany and never came back. Her young flatmate and hospital co-worker Anu (Divya Prabha) is in a secret relationship with a young Muslim man, Shiaz (Hridhu Haroon), that neither of their families would accept.
Prabha lies awake at night, tortured by the gift of a rice cooker from the husband who has abandoned her, but to whom she feels bound. Whereas Anu just wants to find a place she and Shiaz can finally hook up, no matter how many gossips disapprove.
"That's the central conflict, the two women's relationship with their desires," Kapadia says. "You have one who is very caught up in the morality of society, and the other who is not that caught up in that morality, but society is encroaching into her private life regardless."
Their inner turmoils say a lot about the expectations placed on women.
"Prabha's relationship with her husband isn't really a relationship, but it's looked at as more legitimate than Anu's with Shiaz," Kapadia says. "The fall guy in all this is poor Dr Manoj, because Prabha's so caught up in her moral baggage that she's not able to even explore whether she wants to be with him or not."
All the while, the march of progress sweeps older women like their friend Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam) away with the litter, as she battles the demolition of her condemned apartment building.
"Development is important, but it shouldn't be at the cost of the majority," Kapadia says.
"Unfortunately, that is what is happening in Mumbai, especially with access to public space and people's apartments being really far from their place of work. There's constant displacement, so while it's not the main plot, I felt I can't talk about Mumbai if I didn't talk about this."
All three will escape to the sea in the film's final act.
Sound and visions
All We Imagine as Light opens with a Greek chorus, as we hear documentary-like snippets of unseen residents sharing their reality of living in Mumbai. Blurring the lines of fact and fiction in a similar way to A Night of Knowing Nothing allows the film to shift seamlessly from social to magical realism.
"You can wake up from a dream and feel terrible the next day, and that affects your reality, so they are, also, reality," Kapadia says of this liminal drift. "These boundaries should be blurred, because it's more liberating."
Crashing waves roar at unexpected moments thanks to the film's gently unmooring sound design, a playfulness amplified by a mesmerising soundtrack.
The film includes the surprising use of tinkling jazz piano from late Ethiopian star Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou, and the synth stylings of Kolkata-based artist Topshe.
All of this artistry washes over Kapadia's pointed commentary on the attempted erosion of India's 700 spoken languages.
"There is a push to homogenise language in India, but the truth is that most people don't speak what they are trying to make dominant [Hindi]," Kapadia says.
"It's also a characteristic of big cities, where you hear multiple languages all the time because there is so much migration."
Dr Manoj feels alienated because he can't speak Hindi, despite Prabha's best efforts to teach him. For Anu and Shiaz, language becomes a "mode of privacy".
"They can be in a crowded bus and talk about very sexual things because probably nobody else understands. So it can also create a little bubble of privacy, and privacy is a privilege."
Reward enough
When Kapadia was growing up, her mum took her to countless films. Mumbai enjoyed a particularly vibrant documentary filmmaker community, and Kapadia was impressed by Deepa Dhanraj. Later, she watched loads of European movies at film school. "It piqued my interest in different ways of seeing."
Seeing is believing. Kapadia is overjoyed she's now shooting her own movies, with All We Imagine as Light capturing attention worldwide after taking out the Cannes Grand Prix (considered the second-most-prestigious Cannes prize, after the Palme d'Or), and gaining the director a Golden Globe nomination.
Oddly, India didn't field it as their Best International Oscar submission, but that doesn't bother the director.
"Making the film is, in itself, such a huge deal," Kapadia says. "Everything else is a bonus."
As for those who have criticised its forthright sexuality, Kapadia won't lose sleep over them.
"India is a complicated country and, as a filmmaker, one can only try to ruffle feathers a bit."
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