On 25 May, Indian filmmaker Payal Kapadia made history by winning the country’s first ever Grand Prix Award at the 77th Cannes Film Festival. Her Malayalam-Hindi film All We Imagine As Light stars Kani Kusruti and Divya Prabha as nurses working in Mumbai. The movie also stars Chhaya Kadam and Hridhu Haroon.
The Grand Prix is the festival’s second-highest honour after the Palme d’Or which went to Sean Baker’s Anora.
The synopsis for All We Imagine As Light reads: In Mumbai, Nurse Prabha’s routine is troubled when she receives an unexpected gift from her estranged husband. Her younger roommate, Anu, tries in vain to find a spot in the city to be intimate with her boyfriend. A trip to a beach town allows them to find a space for their desires to manifest.
A still from All We Imagine as Light.
(Photo Courtesy: YouTube)
Payal Kapadia’s documentary A Night of Knowing Nothing had premiered at the Cannes 2021 in the Festival’s Director’s Fortnight side-bar and it had received the Oeil d’or (Golden Eye) award.
After Shaji Karun’s Swaham, which competed for the Palme d’Or at the 1994 Cannes, Kapadia’s film was the first Indian title in 30 years to be selected for the prestigious Competition section. Kapadia is also the first Indian woman to be nomination in the category.
The jury for the 77th Cannes was led by filmmaker Greta Gerwig and included Lily Gladstone, Eva Green, Omar Sy, Hirokazy Kore-eda, and Nadine Labaki. Also in Competition were Michel Hazanavicius’s The Most Precious of Cargoes, Yorgos Lanthimos’s Kinds of Kindness, Ali Abbasi’s The Apprentice, Jacques Audiard’s Emilia Perez, and Jia Zhang-Ke’s Caught By The Tides among other notable titles.
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