Payal Kapadia’s film All We Imagine As Light has won the Best International Feature award at the prestigious Gotham Awards 2024.
The award function was held on Monday night at Wall Street in New York. Kapadia graced the occasion to accept the award at the ceremony.
The announcement comes days after the movie received the Jury Grand Prize at the Asia Pacific Screen Awards (APSA) 2024.
The Hindi-Malayalam film was competing with films such as Green Border, Hard Truths, Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell, and Vermiglio.
Kapadia cheered: “It’s our first fiction narrative feature film, so it is super nice to get this”, while accepting the award.
The win is an important one considering All We Imagine As Light was not chosen as the country’s official entry to the Oscars. That place is currently held by director Kiran Rao’s Laapataa Ladies.
Kapadia, however, saw the Oscar selection differently. While speaking to IndieWire earlier, she had said, “I just think it’s really great that there are two films from India that are doing this well, and they’re both by women. So, it’s a great year for us.”
Kapadia went on to explain that every filmmaker has to have some level of interest in the awards race, as it is one of the most reliable ways to ensure that your film is seen around the world. But she noted that her film had already received a large international platform thanks to its success at Cannes.
“Of course everybody cares, it just helps that you get more distribution when you get these awards,” she said. “Even winning at Cannes helped me get distribution in 50 countries. That just means more people watching your movie — and what more could you want in life than more people watching your film?”
In addition to the boost that her career received, Kapadia went on to say that attending Cannes with All We Imagine as Light became a bonding experience that allowed her the opportunity to celebrate alongside her collaborators.
“It was really wonderful,” she said. “Especially because I was there with my entire crew and all the actresses. We had become a close family, so we were able to celebrate together. And you saw us doing that.”
Speaking on the inspiration for the film, Kapadia in a 2017 interview observed: “One does not need to look too far for inspiration because the life that surrounds us is full of poetic possibilities including dreams and memories.” This artistic philosophy was on display in her first feature, the documentary “A Night of Knowing Nothing,” and it’s even more explicit in All We Imagine as Light, a narrative feature about three women in Mumbai struggling to make things work, whatever that might look like.
All We Imagine As Light follows the story of two Kerala nurses who navigate their lives in Mumbai starring Kani Kusruti and Divya Prabha. Following a screening at BFI the film is being shown in select cinemas across the UK.