Biography

Payal Kapadia was born in 1986 in Mumbai, Maharashtra, India. She is a director and writer, known for All We Imagine as Light (2024), A Night of Knowing Nothing (2021) and Afternoon Clouds (2017).

Graduated from the Film and Television Institute of India.

[press conference for All We Imagine as Light (2024) at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival] The title is about hope and about when things are looking a bit bleak - you don't know that there's a way out and you don't sort of imagine that way out - and I thought that hope and light could be used synonymously; and the title was also in the dialogue in the film because of one the characters is stuck for a long time in a dark room and can't imagine light - somehow this connected for me with the idea of a possibility; that you don't see the possibility when you never had it.

[Cannes press conference for All We Imagine as Light (2024)] I was working on the screenplay for a very long time because the first starting point of the film was supposed to be for my final year diploma project at film school and I wanted to make a film which was much smaller than this. At the time I was spending a lot of time with a family member who was not well and was being nursed back to health, and I was there helping out and we spent a lot of time together. I started thinking about the hospital as a microcosm for so many things to take place. But as time passed by, it became a bigger film and I wanted to make a longer film out of it. It's been five years. The screenplay keeps changing as I grow older and your ideas change as you have new experiences, so it completely changed as time went by.

[Cannes press conference for All We Imagine as Light (2024)] This feeling of time was a huge preoccupation for me and I was interested to have a film play with time in this way that we can only do in cinema, which gives me a lot of joy and excitement. Mumbai is a fast city, and you really don't get a moment of rest at all. We wanted to have a kind of pacy sense of time in the first part. But the second part is a sad story, but also a kind of a brief pause from that life, so the time is felt differently. I think we all feel time in a subjective way and in cinema we can also express that.