“I think it’s been a good year for us,” says Payal Kapadia, director of All We Imagine as Light, with almost disarming modesty.
Twelve months ago, her sensitive, subtle, dreamy film about three women hospital workers in Mumbai became the first Indian drama selected for Cannes Film Festival’s main competition in 30 years.
It won the Grand Prix, the festival’s second-most prestigious prize after the Palme d’Orand.
All We Imagine as Light was not the only Indian film to feature at Cannes in 2024. It was joined by Karan Kandhari’s droll British-funded marital comedy Sister Midnight, which stars Radhika Apte as a new wife in a Mumbai slum who undergoes an unusual transformation.
Beside these two films, Santosh – Sandhya Suri’s British-Indian crime yarn starring Shahana Goswami as a widow who inherits her husband’s job as a police constable in rural India – and The Shameless, a romantic crime tale that won Anasuya Sengupta the best actress prize in the festival’s Un Certain Regard strand, also featured.
It does not stop there. Shuchi Talati’s coming-of-age drama Girls Will Be Girls – set in a boarding school in the Himalayan foothills – premiered at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival before going on to win the Independent Spirit John Cassavetes Award, given to productions with budgets less than US$1 million.
