Fingers crossed, not thinking of end result: Payal Kapadia on Oscar bid for 'All We Imagine As Light'

Mumbai: She isn't a person who thinks about the end result, says director Payal Kapadia whose film "All We Imagine As Light" became the first Indian film to win the Grand Prix award at Cannes and could now well make its way to the Oscars.

The film is being released in Kerala on Saturday and later the rest of the India by actor-producer Rana Daggubati's Spirit Media. It has been submitted to the Film Federation of India (FFI), which decides which film will represent India in the international feature film category at the Oscars. The announcement is likely to be made next week.

"We'll try everything that we can," Daggubati told PTI when asked what next in case the film is not chosen as India's entry to the Academy Awards.

It might then be sent for consideration in the general categories.

While the wait continues, Kapadia said she is just going with the flow and enjoying each step.

"I'm not the kind of person who will always think of the end result. It's always a process. Making this film has been a long process, raising funds for it was a process, meeting people was a process and this is also part of the process, so we have to go with it. Let’s see how it goes, our fingers are crossed,” Kapadia told PTI.

Daggubati, who has the rights to distribute the film in both Malayalam and Hindi languages, praised Kapadia as a "pure filmmaker" devoid of marketing gimmicks.

“All We Imagine As Light” earned the love of the audience purely on the basis of merit, he said.

“We are the corrupted ones that get into work to promote, strategise, influence... All that happens on our end. So, they've very purely made a film and where it has gone so far is purely on merit. It's not like how we went for probably ‘Baahubali’ or ‘RRR’, saying, ‘Hey, you know, this is what strategy we will use at the Oscars’. That's not this film, it'll take a very different journey, and I think it's important for India to see different kinds of journeys,” he added.

The film follows Prabha (Kusruti), a Mumbai nurse whose life is thrown in disarray when she receives a rice cooker from her estranged husband. Divya Prabha plays Anu, her roommate and colleague, who is struggling to find a private spot in the city to spend time with her boyfriend. Prabha’s best friend Parvati (Kadam), a widow, is being forced out of her home by property developers.

Kapadia, an alumnus of the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII), thanked the audience and industry people who have shown immense support for the film.

“I don't want to say (name of) one person because there were so many of them who messaged me. There was Karan Johar who said so many nice things about the film in an interview, Javed Akhtar, and Anurag Kashyap, who was so supportive,” she said.

In the early days, she created a social media profile to read people's comments about the film but has now made it private.

The filmmaker, also known for movies like "A Night of Knowing Nothing" and "Afternoon Clouds", said Daggubati's involvement in her movie shows why it is important for mainstream filmmakers to support independent cinema.

“We need this sort of cross-working between what we call the mainstream and the independent. We need the support of the larger industry. It's so nice that this collaboration is happening and it's true with many other small independent filmmakers that we get support from the mainstream. So, this is a way for us to be able to make films as well.” Daggubati said he got to know about the film from his producing partner Pratyusha Jonnalagadda, which he initially thought was an English movie.

“Payal is a brilliant filmmaker, the way she captured life is pretty phenomenal. I haven't seen any Indian film do that in such detail,” he said.

“The last few years at least in South India, you've been seeing a lot of films that were closer to India in that sense but this one just took it to another level. The actors were phenomenal, I was amazed at how good they were and started feeling conscious of how bad I was in the process of doing cinema,” he added.

The movie, titled “Prabhayay Ninachathellam” in Malayalam, is set to debut in limited screens across Kerala on Saturday and will subsequently be released across all major cities in India.

Daggubati said that the decision to release the movie in Kerala first was driven by the fact that the lead actors, Kani Kusruti and Divya Prabha, are from the state.

Highlighting the unique release pattern, he said, “More often than not in India whether it's a mainstream film or art house, they've been taking the same release pattern, which is not usually how it's in the West.

"Cinema like this needs to be heard about, you need enough people knowing about it, speaking about it because what you're competing against in the commercial world, which is big action movies or spectacle stuff." Kapadia said she is most happy that people will "buy a ticket" to watch her film in theatres.

“All We Imagine As Light” is an Indo-French co-production between petit chaos from France and Chalk and Cheese Films from India, and Ranabir Das ('Another Birth'), who also served as the cinematographer on the film, served as the Indian producer on the movie.