How Payal Kapadia's ‘All We Imagine As Light’ Took Flight And Is Collecting Stamps—And Trophies—Worldwide

“I didn't even know some of these awards existed,” Payal Kapadia joked at the 29th International Film Festival of Kerala, where she was felicitated with the Spirit of Cinema Award.

Every day, it seems, Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine As Light (AWIAL) is bagging a new award, scratching new nominations, topping year-end lists of prestige publications and coveted lists like Cahiers du Cinéma, Sight and Sound, and Obama’s annual listicle of films he loved, among others. 

The anger towards the Film Federation of India’s (FFI) all-male jury that refused to pick AWIAL as India’s nomination for the Academy Awards, giving increasingly egregious reasons for the same, piles up in quote-tweeted waves—the frequency of which soars with each new win.

Kapadia’s film, since its premiere at the 77th Cannes Film Festival—the first film from India to compete in the main competition since Swaham in 1994, with Kapadia being the first Indian female filmmaker to do so—where it won the Grand Prix, the second most prestigious award, and the first Indian film to do so, has been on a winding, cross-continental odyssey.

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If yesterday AWIAL was awarded Best Film Not in the English Language Category by the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, and the week before that, winning the New York Film Critics Circle’s Best International Film, today it would be the Online Association of Female Film Critics Awards awarding it the Best International Feature. It won the Grand Jury Prize at the Asia Pacific Screen Awards—“the Asia Pacific Oscars”—and Best International Feature at the Gotham Awards. Then, there are the Film Critic Circles and Guilds from Florida, Philadelphia, Toronto, Phoenix where the film won some variant of “Best Foreign Film” or “Best International Feature Film”.

The results of the Golden Globe Awards are pending—for which she is nominated for Best Director and her film, All We Imagine As Light, for Best Foreign Language Film.

And not to mention the nominations for the Academy Awards.

AWIAL is an Indo-French co-production between Chalk and Cheese Films from India and Petit Chaos from France, as well as Netherlands’ BALDR Film, Luxembourg’s Les Films Fauves, Italy’s Pulpa Films, and France’s Arte France Cinéma. With the film’s rapturous response, distributors lined up to ferry this film across countries.

“The film has been distributed in over 85 countries with a theatrical release in 35+ countries,” Zico Maitra, the Indian producer, tells The Hollywood Reporter India. The distribution strategy is country-specific, determined by local distributors such as Spirit Media in India and Sideshow and Janus Films in the US, who assess the best approach for their respective regions.”

Paris-based Luxbox has signed distribution deals with Rialto for Australia and New Zealand, Rapid Eye Movies for Austria and Germany, Mostra de São Paulo and Telecine in Brazil, Beta Film in Bulgaria, Aerofilms in the Czech Republic, Camera Film in Denmark and Cinemanse Oy in Finland.

AWIAL is an Indo-French co-production between Chalk and Cheese Films from India and Petit Chaos from France, as well as Netherlands’ BALDR Film, Luxembourg’s Les Films Fauves, Italy’s Pulpa Films, and France’s Arte France Cinéma. With the film’s rapturous response, distributors lined up to ferry this film across countries.

Further distribution deals were signed with BFI Distribution in the UK and Ireland, Edko Films in Hong Kong, Mozinet in Hungary, Bio Paradis in Iceland, Falcon in Indonesia, Europictures in Italy, Cetera in Japan, Canibal Networks in Mexico, Another World Entertainment in Norway, Voodoo Films in Romania, Exponenta Film for CIS, Njutafilms in Sweden, Swallow Wings Films in Taiwan, Sahamongkolfilm in Thailand, and Bir Film in Turkey.

As Variety notes, AWIAL is set to become “one of the most theatrically distributed Indian indies of all time”.

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In France, with Condor Distributions, AWIAL, released in over 185 theaters. The French poster looked odd, as though the women (Kani Kusruti as Prabha and Divya Prabha as Anu, both nurses and roommates) were at war, against a shade of blue that felt grungier than the film’s tarpaulin tones and hallation. Kapadia, speaking about the poster, notes that even as she might have had reservations, when she saw the poster in the theaters, she saw how the design choices made the film stand apart from the rest of the films. The blue helped.

In the United States of America, the release was staggered, with two screenings in two cities—New York, Los Angeles—then cascading down to Chicago, Dallas, Philadelphia, San Diego, and San Francisco.

Kapadia has no pretensions about the scale of the film’s release, despite its width, “We are small there also, here also. It is not like we are going up against Wicked or something.”

In India, after a limited release in Kerala in September—under the Malayalam title Prabhayay Ninachathellam—they have had over 150 screenings since November. “I joined Twitter because I wanted to tell people to come and see my film,” Kapadia notes. Her X account became a way to not just advertise screenings taking place, telling people to insist on watching it in the correct aspect ratio—1.66:1 as opposed to what our screens are used to showing, films in 2.39:1, a more rectangular image—but also to mobilise crowds, asking them to fill forms of interest so screenings can be organised in smaller cities like Dehradun, Chandigarh, Bhubaneswar, Kanpur, Patna.

Her account is testament to the fact that today, to be an artist is not enough; you must be an artist-entrepreneur.

“Each market has found their own way to best present AWIAL keeping their local audience in mind. In India we launched the film with its first poster with which we also launched the film at Cannes. We also preserved the multiplicity of languages and its representation in the film, which is true to the city of Mumbai, by showcasing it in its original non-dubbed form,” Maitra notes.

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The film, shot in Maharashtra, with  two of its three protagonists being Malayali, eludes easy categories. Despite many offers from more coveted distributors, Kapadia went with the Hyderabad-based Spirit Media founded by Rana Daggubati. This would be the first time they would distribute a non-Telugu film.

On BookMyShow, the film’s language is stated as Malayalam. Kapadia has stuck to her convictions, and the film’s thrust, even as possibilities shimmered elsewhere. She knows the sanctity of language. She knows how it can be tarnished by the homogenising pull of the mainstream. In a conversation alongside a filmmaker she idolises, Miguel Gomes, she notes, “You can make a private room with language in a crowded place.”