“With a mother who was a videographer and a father who was a psychoanalyst, I could only be a director! »sums up Payal Kapadia, 38, bursting into laughter. Indian Director of Everything we imagine as lightGrand Prix at Cannes, portrait of three women in transit, captured in an extraordinary color palette, surprises with its vitality. Born in 1986 in Bombay, she was unveiled with All night without knowing (2021), searing essay on militant youth, selected for Quinzaine des cinémas, Cannes Golden Eye for Best Documentary. Her next film is already on the way, she tells us: “It’s going to be a comedy!” »
Will ‘A Whole Night Without Knowing’, which denounced Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist government’s control of universities, create problems?
The movie it was not distributed in India like most documentaries from my home country. Certainly, it has circulated heavily in festivals, screened in film clubs and galleries across India. But it didn’t weigh much compared to all the propaganda films that the government supports, real blockbusters that conveyed false, especially Islamophobic ideas – I remember a script with a Muslim character who had twelve wives… At Cannes in May, the Indian pavilion presented several such works.
Are these propaganda films successful in India?
Yes, because they are very well produced. People get into stories all the better, which is problematic. At the International Film Festival of India, Goa in 2022, the director Nadav Lapidwho presided over the jury, triggered a diplomatic incident by lamenting, during the closing ceremony, the presence of the film in the competition The Kashmir filesby Vivek Agnihotri (which reviews with a number of inaccuracies the exodus of Hindus from Kashmir in the 1990s under pressure from Muslim extremists).
“All We Imagine as Light” paints a portrait of an inhospitable city, Bombay. Your female characters come to seek freedom, while banning themselves from things…
Bombay is a paradoxical city. It is undoubtedly easier to find work there, but the days are long and there are few social regulations. Parvaty’s character, a cook and undocumented resident, lives in a building threatened with destruction on the site of the old cotton mills. In the past, workers lived there on a communal basis. Then the workshops closed, giving way to shopping malls. I am not saying that these workers’ houses were comfortable, but these people had to leave the city.
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