Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) alumna Payal Kapadia’s debut feature film All We Imagine as Light will premiere at the 77th Cannes Film Festival in the competition section, the festival organisers announced on Thursday.
Kapadia had previously won the Golden Eye award for best documentary at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival for her documentary A Night of Knowing Nothing.
“ALL WE IMAGINE AS LIGHT – Payal KAPADIA #Competition #Cannes2024,” the official handle of the festival posted on X.
A joint production of India and France, All We Imagine as Light revolves around Prabha and Anu, nurses hailing from Kerala and employed at a nursing home in Mumbai. Prabha's world is shaken when she unexpectedly receives a present from her estranged spouse, while Anu, her roommate, seeks privacy for a romantic encounter with her boyfriend. Their escape to a coastal town prompts them to break free from the constraints that have defined their existence thus far.
Kapadia’s film will be competing against Iranian filmmaker Ali Abbasi’s The Apprentice, Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis and Yorgos Lanthimos’s Kind of Kindness.
The other films selected in the competition section at the 77th Cannes Film Festival include Karim Aïnouz's Motel Destino, Andrea Arnold's Bird, Jacques Audiard's Emilia Perez, Sean Baker's Anora, David Cronenberg's The Shrouds, Coralie Fargeat's The Substance, Miguel Gomes's Grand Tour, Christophe Honoré's Marcello Mio and Jia Zhang-Ke's Feng Liu Yi Dai (Caught by the Tides).
Gilles Lellouche's L'Amour Ouf, Agathe Riedinger's Diamant Brut (Wild Diamond), Paul Schrader's Oh Canada, Kirill Serebrennikov's Limonov – The Ballad, Paolo Sorrentino's Parthenope, and Magnus von Horn's Pigen Med Nålen (The Girl with the Needle) are also featured in the competition section.
Apart from All We Imagine as Light, Sandhya Suri’s UK-European co-production Santosh, featuring Shahana Goswami and Sanjay Bishnoi has been selected at the festival in the UN Certain Regard section. Bulgarian director Konstantin Bojanov's The Shameless, which features Mita Vashisht, Tanmay Dhanania, Auroshikha Dey and Rohit Kokate, is also part of the same section.
