“I Like to Be Ill-Defined”: Director Payal Kapadia on All We Imagine as Light

My second viewing of director Payal Kapadia’s film All We Imagine As Light was the night before I had the chance to interview her. I left a late screening at the Film Forum in New York City, and the dark streets mirrored the haunting blues of Kapadia’s film—an ode, she tells me, to monsoon-soaked Mumbai, where homes hide beneath tinted blue tarps. “In the darkness,” goes a line from the movie, “you try to imagine light.” As I made my way home, I found myself moved by the romance of the friendships portrayed in the film, blooming in tender moments amid strife and agony.

The strength of All We Imagine as Light, which earned the 38-year-old filmmaker a Best Director nomination at the 2025 Golden Globe Awards, lies in its refusal to be just one thing, like a poem whose meaning shifts with each read. Despite becoming the first Indian movie to compete at the Cannes Film Festival in over thirty years, the Film Federation of India declined to submit her movie for Best International Feature Film at this year’s Academy Awards. Their reasoning? They told Kapadia the film wasn’t “Indian enough.” After that ruling, I hopped on an early Zoom call with Kapadia to chat about what is “Indian enough” and why, for her, the greatest reward for her years of effort isn’t an Oscar, but people watching her film whatsoever.

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SHAHAMAT UDDIN: First, I just want to say thank you so much for making this movie. It’s so special in so many different ways. I first saw it at TIFF a few months ago and I was really struck by it, but the press screening was at nine in the morning—

PAYAL KAPADIA: Oh, nine o’clock is just cruel.

UDDIN: It was a good start to the day. But I actually watched it again last night at Film Forum in New York, which gave me some of the more nocturnal vibes of the film. It means so much to me. My family’s from Bangladesh. My parents grew up in Sylhet  and then ended up moving to Dhaka, so I saw a lot of the similarities of the countryside and the city. You’ve had such a big year, so congratulations.

KAPADIA: Thank you.

UDDIN: How are you feeling in this moment?

KAPADIA: You can see it in my eyes. I don’t know what time zone I am in. I’m just going from here to there talking.

UDDIN: Did you imagine a year ago that this is what this moment would feel like?

KAPADIA: Absolutely not. I had no idea. Our film doesn’t have a huge amount of marketing and advertising, so it is because of good writing from critics and support from film festivals that people get to know about it. Otherwise, even in India, it’s so hard to talk about a film where I’m showing between two blockbuster Bollywood movies. It helps a lot that the press write about it positively.

UDDIN: I read that the inception of this film came a while ago. You were working full-time while also visiting sick family members in hospitals. Being in those spaces inspired this script, right? What does your creative process look like?

KAPADIA: It’s always different with every film. With this one, I took a lot of time to do it. At the time when I wrote the first page out, I was still a student in my final year of film school, so there was a bit of time to write. There was also purpose. You had to submit the script. I’m a bit of a nerd. I feel very happy when I have authority over my head saying, “Please submit now,” because it forces me to work. 

UDDIN: Absolutely. What does your workspace look like?

KAPADIA: I mean, I write a lot. For one good page, I write at least 15 bad ones. So I wake up every morning, and when I’m in my writing phase, I write at least from 9 a.m to noon, just sitting in one place and drinking large amounts of coffee. But this is my favorite part of filmmaking. I really enjoy sitting and writing. It gives me the greatest joy. Then in the afternoon, I do a bit of research or I watch a film or I go out and meet people. I do more practical work at that time, because in the afternoon you feel like taking a nap. I just want to sleep, and it’s too difficult to write.

UDDIN: You describe yourself as a hopeless romantic, and I saw so much of that in the film—whether it be the poem that Prabhu received from the doctor or the literal goosebumps on Shiaz’s skin when he’s being touched by Anu. But I see so much romance in the female friendships in the film, too. One thing that stood out to me in your Cannes acceptance speech is you really called out the power of female friendships. So I’m curious, what parts of female friendships were you really interested in showing on the screen?

KAPADIA: I don’t know how true it is for all of South Asia, but I feel like a lot of our media is about women hating each other. And oh my god, the amount of this stuff on television, it just gives me a headache. I think there is something about friendship between women that scares society a lot. They are like, “No, what if they all get together and tell us to fuck off?” A lot of the things we watch are designed to perpetuate the patriarchy even deeper. So for me, I wanted to have a relationship between women, which could possibly be a utopian one, where it is healthy, happy, and accepting.

UDDIN: What in particular did you use to counteract that portrayal, and what parts of these healthy friendships did you feel like were the most important to show? 

KAPADIA: For me, friendship is a relationship that’s very accepting because there’s no baggage involved—even if we are very different from one another. So for me, the fact that Anu brings her boyfriend to get approval not from her parents, but from her friend, and Prabha accepting that and also teasing her about it is something that Prabha wouldn’t have done a little while ago. She would’ve been completely shocked or envious. Where Prabha is envious of Anu also. She’s like, “How could she dare to do what I couldn’t do?” Personally, I’ve also felt that sometimes with my friends—this mixed feeling of awe and envy. But the fact that Anu got the support from these women is a courageous start to be able to stand up against the battle that is yet to come.

UDDIN: I was also reading that Malayalam isn’t your native tongue, and you actually had a lot of dialect coaches on the film. So what’s it like directing a film in a language that you don’t speak?

KAPADIA: It was crazy. I don’t know why I decided to do this because… My last film I did was in Hindi and Bangla. I don’t even speak Bangla, but I can understand Bangla because, fundamentally, the root language is the same. But this is a totally different root language. It’s Tamil and Sanskrit mixed to make Malayalam, so it was a completely crazy idea. I had really good dialogue writers who worked with me for two years and were also with me on the set. We worked in a very basic kind of way because they would do a translation, we would make our friends record it, and we would listen back to it. And then suppose a word doesn’t sound right—it has a very hard sound to it or something—we would think of synonyms based on sound if a scene needed to be more soft, because Malayalam is actually a very hard language. Everything really is P-A and B-A and very unlike Bangla. I like more rounded languages, so I was trying to choose all the rounder words. It was like making music, really.

UDDIN: Your background as a documentarian really shines through in the different techniques that you used. The opening of the film feels like a documentary, and then we shift into this fiction structure. 

KAPADIA: I really like cinema that is not categorized into anything. That you can say, “Is it fiction? Is it non-fiction? What is the genre? We don’t know.” That kind of non-classification is what excites me. I like to be ill-defined. It’s more fun. I wanted to start with the non-fiction to entice you into this world as if it is all true. I was hoping it feels as if it’s a documentary, even though they’re all actors. It’s a ruse. And slowly, it goes into a dreamlike state, into something that is way more internal and more like a fairy tale or a folktale. As human beings, we are always on these multiple planes of reality. Sometimes you have a bad dream and you wake up and your whole day is a bit ruined. So all that is reality, really.

UDDIN: Another part of the film that really stood out for me obviously is the title: All We Imagine as Light. Light is used so intentionally throughout the film. During the first half of the film, the hues of blue were so apparent. Until the second half, when there wasn’t any blue involved. Can you talk about your intentions with color and light and how you not only wanted to showcase that, but reflect the message of the movie? 

KAPADIA: Wow. There are many things in your question.

UDDIN: [Laughs] I know. I asked a lot.

KAPADIA: My cinematographer and I did a lot of tests. Over two monsoons ago, we started shooting Mumbai with a small camera just as a documentary exercise to see how we see. So for that, both of us went around shooting a lot. And one thing we noticed is the monsoon is a very particular time. If you are familiar with Bangladesh, you would also have similar feelings of the monsoon, right? I think you all have more than one monsoon, but—

UDDIN: Yeah, a lot.

KAPADIA: We don’t have seasons. We just have monsoon, and then no monsoon. It’s that weird rain, which is not that cool. It just feels hot, and you’re sweating so much. There’s this claustrophobic feeling. The characters also felt as if they were all a bit stuck, so I thought it went well with the monsoon season. And while we were doing the documentary shooting, we noticed that, in the monsoon, Mumbai becomes very blue because everything gets covered with these blue plastic tarpaulin sheets. A lot of people have done photo series on this. We wanted to highlight that bright, plasticky blue. And in the second half, we shot in a district called Ratnagiri where the main landscape is made from laterite rock, which is a terracotta color. We wanted to highlight that aspect of the landscape, so we went towards more red and yellow colors. That was the thought process.

UDDIN: That really comes through. I know that you’ve been asked about this so many times, so forgive me, but there’s so much conversation about the Oscars. You received criticism from this 13-man Indian board committee that your film wasn’t Indian enough. So I’m curious, what is India to you?

KAPADIA: See, I don’t know what he meant. I don’t even know what we could say is Indian. There are so many Indias. We are such a vast, wild country. A film from Mumbai has nothing to do with a film from Tamil Nadu. It has nothing to do with a film from West Bengal or Assam. They’re all so different. So there is no one India, no one Indian thing. And that is the beauty of this country. Getting the prize was really nice, and all this recognition is really good. But for me, what is exciting is that the film is released in India. That really is one of the best things because it’s not easy to release a film in India. I am between very big Bollywood films. In India, the distribution landscape is miserable because the ticket prices are so low that exhibitors are so scared the film won’t do well, so they only want to book Pushpa 2. But we’ve put out our tiny little film without any marketing money, without any song and dance, and without any big stars, and people are going out to the cinema to watch it. I think that has been my greatest joy in this process.

UDDIN: What has the Indian reception been like versus what you’ve seen in the United States or the UK or even France?

KAPADIA: See, there are a lot of Easter eggs in this movie that only Indians will get, and some that only Indian women will get. I can’t spell them out, but they’re there. Thankfully, people have been noticing them. I’ve been getting so many messages. I joined Instagram just so I could know what people are thinking, and I got a lot of very wonderful essays on the film. I used to write about films that I liked, and I used to write to the filmmaker if I liked their film, so that just feels really special.