A glorious moment for India at Cannes

India was again on the big stage of world cinema on Saturday when director Payal Kapadia won the Grand Prix, the highest award of the festival, for her feature film All We Imagine as Light. It was after 30 years that an Indian film was at Cannes for the Palm d’Or. American director Sean Baker’s ‘Anora’ won the Palme d’Or but India made its presence felt at the cinema’s top forum with impressive entries.

Kapadia’s film won praise from audiences who gave it an eight-minute standing ovation on Friday after the show. The film had been talked about ever since it was selected for the competition section a few weeks ago.

Kapadia was known as a director with much promise, especially after her 2021 documentary A Night of Knowing Nothing, which dealt with protests by students on Indian campuses, was shown at Cannes. She was herself a leader of the protests in 2015 against the appointment of Gajendra Chauhan as director of the Pune film institute where she was a student. 

Kapadia’s short film Afternoon Clouds was screened at Cannes in 2017. She won the Golden Eye award for the best documentary in 2021 for A Night of Knowing Nothing. She has arrived on the stage now with the top prize and will remain the face of India in the years to come.

It is important that a woman director has earned her stripes by telling the story of two women in an India that is witnessing changes in social relations, gender norms and other areas.

Her film is a story of two Kerala nurses living in Mumbai, and stars actors Kani Kusruti, Divya Prabha and Chhaya Kadam. Kapadia and others have shown that there is an artistic alternative to the dazzle of Bollywood and good cinema can be done without big budgets and with actors who have no star value. It is the creative spirit that matters, and not just variations of a formula.

There is fresh ground being broken by young directors and actors, and it is remarkable that many of them are women telling women’s stories. 

Cannes saw a lot of India this year. There were seven Indian films and events with an Indian connection. Anasuya Sengupta won the Best Actress award for her role in the Bulgarian film The Shameless. Chidananda Naik and Mansi Maheswari won prizes in the La Cinef category. Sandhya Suri’s and Karan Kandhari’s films attracted much attention.

Santosh Sivan received the Pierre Angénieux Tribute award and Manthan was screened in the Cannes Classics section. There are new voices from new places, new stories and new ways of telling them.