The first iteration of the Cannes Film Festival, planned for 1939, was scuppered when Germany invaded Poland to trigger the start of World War II. But when the festival finally got off the ground in 1946, Indian cinema came out swinging. Mounted shortly after the conclusion of the war, the first “real” Cannes Film Festival featured competition entries from Billy Wilder (The Lost Weekend), Roberto Rossellini (Open City), and David Lean (Brief Encounter). In the spirit of post-war peace and reconciliation, the competition jury, headed by French historian Georges Huisman, handed the top prize — then the Grand Prix — to films from 11 of the 18 countries represented that year.
This included India, with Chetan Anand’s social-realist drama Neecha Nagar, and, for a decade at least, the country was a regular fixture in Competition. After Anand came V. Shantaram with Amar Bhoopali (1952), then Raj Kapoor with Awaara (1953), and Bimal Roy with Do Bigha Zamin (1954). But the film that put India on the map in Cannes was the debut feature by director Satyajit Ray, whose film Pather Panchali — the first of his now-famous ‘Apu Trilogy’ — was championed by prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru and won the one-off honor of Best Human Document. After Ray’s Devi in 1962, however, the run was broken, and, for a while, it seemed that Shaji N. Karun’s Swaham (1994), a Malayalam-language drama, might be the last Indian film ever to play in competition.
But now India is about to break its 30-year hiatus with Mumbai-based filmmaker Payal Kapadia’s ambitious fiction feature debut All We Imagine As Light. Shot over 25 late summer days in Mumbai, followed by an extra 15 in the rainy western port town of Ratnagiri, the Malayalam-Hindi language feature tells the story of two young women — Prabha, a nurse from Mumbai, and Anu, her roommate. A rare French-Indo co-production, it is a collaboration between the Paris-based producers Thomas Hakim and Julien Graff, of petit chaos, and Zico Maitra of Chalk & Cheese Films out of Mumbai.
All We Imagine as Light is the first feature from Maitra’s Chalk and Cheese after nine years of primarily producing commercials for television and digital media. Hakim and Graff are a buzzy-producing duo widely recognized across the European festival circuit for an impressive range of short and feature projects. The pair’s last project, The Moon Also Rises, a 24-minute Mandarin-language doc, debuted in Berlin earlier this year.
“I met Payal in 2018 at the Berlinale where she was presenting her short film And What is the Summer Saying,” Hakim says as he sneaks away from the editing suite where he and Kapadia are completing their final cut. “As we were living in different parts of the world, it didn’t seem like were meant to meet or work together. But I felt a deep connection with her cinema as if we were speaking a common language.”
Hakim says European development funds like Rotterdam’s Hubert Bals grant, and the Cannes Cinéfondation Residency, allowed Kapadia to reside in Europe, where they could develop their joint practice before mounting the ambitious production in her native India. “The French and European funding system, through CNC, Eurimages, the Gan Foundation, Cineworld, Visions Sud Est, and Hubert Bals, along with private partners like Arte, Luxbox, Condor, and Pulpa Film allowed us to gather the financing and shoot the entire film in India, with a 99% Indian cast and crew,” he adds. “In the process, it was important that this co-production stayed organic and didn’t alter Payal’s vision with unnecessary constraints.”
An alumnus of the state-run Film and Television Institute of India (FTII), Kapadia has history at Cannes. In 2017, she screened Afternoon Clouds, a 13-minute project, as part of the festival’s Cinéfondation shorts sidebar. Her last film, the non-fiction project A Night of Knowing Nothing (2021), also produced by Hakim and Graff for petit chaos, screened in Director’s Fortnight, where it won the Golden Eye for best documentary.
Set mainly at the FTII, A Night of Knowing Nothing is perhaps best described as a kaleidoscopic mix of fiction and documentary filmmaking centered around India’s anti-caste movement, as explored through the lives of two film students who have been forced to end their inter-caste relationship. Kapadia began shooting it in the wake of a months-long student strike at FTII, protesting against the Narendra Modi government’s appointment of TV actor and right-wing politician Gajendra Chauhan as the university’s new chairman.
Similar themes are explored by British-Indian filmmaker Sandhya Suri in her feature Santosh, also set for the Riviera, where it will debut in Un Certain Regard. Developed at Sundance’s screenwriting and directing labs, Santosh follows a recently widowed woman, played by Shahana Goswami (Zwigato, A Suitable Boy), who inherits her husband’s job as a police constable in Northern India. When a low-caste girl is found raped and murdered, she is pulled into the investigation.
Suri explains that the film was born of her desire to find a “meaningful way” to talk about violence against women. “I was in India researching and working with various NGOs when I came across an image,” she says. It was a photograph taken at one of the nationwide protests following the notorious case of 2012, in which a 22-year-old physiotherapy student was gang-raped and fatally wounded on a public bus (the anonymous woman was initially known as ‘Nirbhaya’ — a Hindi word meaning ‘fearless’ — since Indian law prohibited the naming of rape victims).
“The photograph,” says Suri, “was an image from Delhi of a huge crowd of angry female protestors, their faces contorted with rage, and a line of female police officers, forcing them back. One of them had such an enigmatic expression. I was fascinated by her. What a gulf between her and those protesting, what power her uniform wielded, and what powerlessness not to feel safe as an ordinary woman. To explore this violence and her power within it felt exciting.”
Santosh is Suri’s narrative directorial debut. Backed by the BFI and BBC Film in co-production with ZDF/ARTE and the CNC, the Hindi-language film was shot over 44 days around the city of Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh, India. An alumnus of the U.K.’s National Film and Television School, she’s best known internationally for the feature documentary I For India, which premiered in the World Competition section at the Sundance Film Festival in 2006 and charts her family’s experience migrating from India to Britain in the 1960s. She also directed the BAFTA-nominated short The Field.
“I’ve been developing and researching this film for almost a decade,” says Suri, “so it’s been a long, slow burn and such a huge delight to be selected after all that to Un Certain Regard for my first fiction film.”
Also in Un Certain Regard is Bulgarian filmmaker Konstantin Bojanov, who has also turned to India for his Un Certain Regard title The Shameless, his follow-up to the 2017 Barry Keoghan-starrer Light Thereafter. The film deals with the taboo subject of sex work, telling the story of a woman who flees a Delhi brothel after stabbing a policeman to death. Meanwhile, in Directors’ Fortnight, Karan Kandhari’s black comedy Sister Midnight follows a smalltown misfit (Radhika Apte) struggling with an arranged marriage. The British Council has described it as, “A fantastical punk comedy, a feminist revenge film, and a revamped vampire movie rolled into one.”
And if the return of Indian voices isn’t enough, All We Imagine As Light is about to make another kind of history: Kapadia will be the first Indian woman ever to compete for the Palme d’Or.
“The outpouring of love all across the country for the historical Cannes selection has been heartening to witness,” says Zico Maitra. “I hope there will be more and more support from Indian financiers for independent films and filmmakers like Payal, and that the success of this film can be the catalyst that humbly inspires others.”
Kapadia described her selection as “thrilling and humbling” in a statement shortly after Thierry Frémaux’s opening press conference. “I admire many directors selected in this section,” she said, “both in the past and present. It’s an immense honor to be showing my film among them.” Meanwhile, rushing back to the editing suite, Hakim adds: “We are very proud that our film brings India back to the main Competition of Cannes.”
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