A stone in Narendra Modi’s garden. By retaining in competition All We Imagine as Light (“All that we imagine as light”), the new film by Indian filmmaker Payal Kapadia, the Cannes Film Festival is not only repairing an injustice, that of an India systematically excluded from the race for the Palme d’Or for thirty years, despite the enormity of his cinematographic production. Even its rank as guest of honor on the Croisette in 2013 did nothing.
The doors to cinema seemed closed to one of the most prolific countries in the world. You have to go back to 1994 to remember an Indian film in competition. At the time it was about Swaham (Destiny), by Keralais Shaji Karun, director who won the Caméra d’Or five years earlier with Piravi (The birth), his first feature film.
But Cannes also sends a strong signal to Hindu nationalist leader Narendra Modi, in power since 2014 and candidate for a third term, during the general elections which take place until June 4 in the subcontinent. Payal Kapadia, 38, is renowned “intrepid”, by his approach “remarkable and very unusual experimental” of cinema, relates the critic Meenakshi Shedde, which makes her one of the incarnations of the resistance of the seventh art to the ideological influence of the Islamophobic far-right regime on the country.
The story of two Hindu nurses
In the realm of censorship that Narendra Modi imposes on all forms of criticism and dissent, the young director born in Bombay, the city of Bollywood, imposes a cinema of reality. Not that she intends, through form, to carry out an act of propaganda through her work, but because “all cinema is political”, she said in 2021, when her first feature film shot in the style of French filmmaker Chris Marker, A Night of Knowing Nothing (All night without knowing) won the Golden Eye prize for best documentary at the Directors’ Fortnight.
This time, Payal Kapadia arrives in Cannes with a fiction. All We Imagine as Light, produced in France by Petit Chaos, in co-production with the Indian Chalk and Cheese Films, the Dutch Baldr Film, the Luxembourgish Les Films Fauves and Arte France Cinéma. That is to say, funding that is more international than Indian. The film, which should be released on October 2, nevertheless also wants to be deliberately anchored in a deeply human story. It delves into the hospital environment of Bombay, the real one, to tell the story of two Hindu nurses staying under the same roof, played by two actresses from Kerala, Divya Prabha and Kani Kusruti.
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