All We Imagine As Light tells the story of female friendships, but it is also about migrants and their unending search for papers to show that they belong.
What is it that makes for good art? The answer to this has been variously interpreted as originality, a grand vision, telling stories that few others would, in ways that not many would consider. Before the announcement of Payal Kapadia’s Grand Prix win for her debut feature All We Imagine As Light at the Cannes International Film Festival, actor Viola Davis added another element to the debate — precarity: “Art doesn’t come from a safe place”. India’s showing at Cannes this year, of which Kapadia’s win is the highlight, validates this. From Anasuya Sengupta’s Best Actress award for her performance in Bulgarian director Konstantin Bojanov’s The Shameless (in the Un Certain Regard section) to director-cinematographer Santosh Sivan’s Pierre Angénieux ExcelLens in Cinematography honour, making him the first Asian to win it, from Chidananda S Naik winning La Cinef for Sunflowers Were The First to Know, to Maisam Ali debuting with In Retreat at the ACID Cannes sidebar, the first Indian to do so, it shows a quiet confidence in one’s ability to forge a path where there seems to be none.
Kapadia would, of course, know this the best. Her win, 30 years after Shaji N Karun’s Swaham was selected for the competition section, has been claimed by India as its own. Congratulatory messages are pouring in, including from her alma mater, the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII), that had lodged a case against Kapadia and 34 of her batchmates for protesting against the selection of actor-politician Gajendra Chauhan as the institute’s chairperson in 2015. Dissent is never an easy path to tread — the cases against the former students are still pending — but in choosing to stand behind stories of all that is broken, Kapadia does art a great service: She offers it hope. In 2021, her A Night of Knowing Nothing on student politics and the anxieties of caste in Indian campuses, won the prize for best documentary at Cannes. All We Imagine As Light tells the story of female friendships, but it is also about migrants and their unending search for papers to show that they belong.
There is another upside to India’s Cannes triumph and it deals with what has traditionally driven a wedge between cinema that is considered “mainstream” and that which is “arthouse”: Commerce. Kapadia’s film was co-produced by companies from India, France, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and Italy, freeing her up from the pressures of conformity. Ali, another FTII graduate, made In Retreat with his batchmates. Their global reception shows there is a market for innovative storytelling, freed from the onus of profit-making, one that India appears to have forfeited in the past few decades. The success at Cannes, therefore, is a good moment to revive an ecosystem that prioritises craft. During the shooting of his first film Pather Panchali (Song of the Road) in the early 1950s, which shows how grand narratives of development elude the poor, Satyajit Ray reportedly ran into a fund crunch. When he approached the West Bengal government, money was allotted from the Public Works Department since the film’s title referred to roads. It won 11 international awards, including the inaugural Best Human Document award at the 1956 Cannes. And history was made.
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First uploaded on: 28-05-2024 at 07:27 IST
