Lessons ‘All We Imagine as Light’ can teach Bollywood

Krishnendu Bose

Much has been said and written about the film and the 38-year-old filmmaker. The world is celebrating her coming of age. Her documentary A Night of Knowing Nothing has already won the top prize at Cannes and a clutch of prestigious international awards in 2021. Both these films break the traditional genre of documentary and fiction. She says she tries to shoot non-fiction like fiction and fiction in the non-fiction mould. Rarely will one see such a free-flowing interlaced narrative form, where actors look and feel like real-life characters and cities look lived in and caught unaware of the camera’s gaze.

Rarely also, do audiences in India see the best of the world cinema on the big screen. This film, thus makes a certain language accessible. It makes it possible for young filmmakers to imagine their ideas seeing the light of day, away from Bollywood funding and marketing. More importantly, Kapadia’s film is a masterclass for the 100-year-old Indian film industry, especially Bollywood. She offers a chance to the 200-billion-rupee industry to learn the language of the subtle and sublime. That less could be more. That actors may not have to be over the top and exaggerated. They could be way more effective by being in their character and not always being the star. Kapadia creates familiar characters — ones you feel you feel you know, even if you live very different lives. She demonstrates how to make the actor jump out of the screen and sit beside you by making the world of cinema believable. Her situating the film in Mumbai opens up a new way of seeing the city.

Numerous Bollywood stories have been located in Mumbai and have portrayed it in myriad ways. In Ram Gopal Verma’s Satya, “light” captures the monsoon-wet Mumbai like a painting, with all its ugliness and intimacy. Kapadia’s Mumbai portrays people struggling to eke out a living empathetically. Within the city, Kapadia builds strong political narratives of class and religion, which affect the lives of the characters as the film unfolds.

Unfortunately, the industry seems to have only mastered the art of churning out mindless cinema — except for a few good filmmakers in each era. Today, the Bengali trio of Shoojit Sircar, Sujoy Ghosh and Dibakar Banerjee are the exceptions. Hrishikesh Mukherjee, Basu Bhattacharya and Basu Chatterjee, were, in the ‘70s and ‘80s, doing the same on the margins of Bollywood. Anurag Kashyap and Vishal Bhardwaj make up a minuscule percentage of filmmakers who have not succumbed to the lure and power of Bollywood. During a brief period in Indian cinema history, the National Film Development Corporation (NFDC) was created and supported world-class directors. Mira Nair, Aparna Sen, Shyam Benegal, Govind Nihalani, Mrinal Sen, Richard Attenborough, Adoor Gopalakrishnan, Ketan Mehta are some names that NFDC worked with. Many of Satyajit Ray’s films were produced or partly financed by Film Finance Corporation, an earlier avatar of NFDC. Currently, the NFDC portal invites proposals for film funding to capture the “diversity of India”.

The OTTs of today are just extensions of Bollywood. So, young filmmakers inspired by Kapadia may not find much success there. The state also has little interest or knowledge of good cinema and may have no desire to create or promote it. All We Imagine as Light was rejected by the Film Federation of India, the committee that selects the Indian Oscar entry. The jury thought it was like a European film set in India. What is an Indian film? All We Imagine as Light touches upon themes like inter-religious relationships, documents the only evidence of identity, land-gobbling real estate companies and the universal human conditions of loneliness, desire, love, and friendship. Surely, these are Indian enough, aren’t they? Laapataa Ladies, they thought was Indian enough to be sent to the Oscars. While All We Imagine as Light collects prestigious international awards and is an independent Oscar entry, all India deserves is Laapataa Ladies.

All We Imagine as Light gives a much-needed opportunity for not just the Indian film industry and OTTs but also the state and the audience to expand their choices and horizons of good cinema. Even after being one of the oldest filmmaking countries, India is nowhere on the pecking board of world cinema. Kapadia is the first Indian to win the Grand Prix at Cannes. It is an ironic twist of fate that politicians, the media and the Mumbai film industry’s top guns rush to congratulate and own Kapadia, as the award-winning celebrity Indian filmmaker. Here’s hoping these entities will learn and evolve to encourage better films and film appreciation in India.

The writer is Director, Co-Founding Trustee, Earthcare Productions