Payal Kapadia is a Mumbai-based filmmaker and MVFF47 Mind the Gap Award winner. She studied film direction at the Film and Television Institute of India. Her short films Afternoon Clouds (2017) and And What Is The Summer Saying (2018) premiered, respectively, at the Cinéfondation and the Berlinale. Her first feature film A Night of Knowing Nothing premiered at Cannes 2021 Directors’ Fortnight, where it won the Golden Eye. Her second feature film and narrative debut, All We Imagine as Light, won the Grand Prix at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival.
Crafted with visual poetry and emotional empathy, this 2024 Cannes Film Festival Grand Prix winner from MVFF Mind the Gap Award honoree Payal Kapadia shines a light on three nurses as they negotiate love and life in the teeming Mumbai metropolis. Prabha has a husband living overseas, her younger roommate Anu is carrying on a secret relationship with a Muslim boy, and Parvati plans to leave the big city after her husband dies. Without the support of men, these women forge bonds of mutual support while dispensing much-needed information and advice to their female patients. Cinematographer Ranabir Das tracks their days from work to home with a shimmering beauty, especially in the nighttime scenes. As the film moves from city to country in its second half, the women’s relationships shift and deepen as Kapadia finds the small but wondrous epiphanies in everyday lives.
