“In India, independent cinema no longer has state support”

“With a mother who was a videographer and a father who was a psychoanalyst, I could only be a filmmaker! »summarizes Payal Kapadia, 38, bursting out laughing. The Indian director of All We Imagine as LightGrand Prix at Cannes, portrait of three women in transit, captured in an extraordinary chromatic palette, surprises with its vitality. Born in 1986, in Bombay, she was revealed with All night without knowing (2021), burning essay on militant youth, selected for the Quinzaine des cinémas, in Cannes, Golden Eye for best documentary. Her next film is already on the way, she tells us: “It will be a comedy!” »

Did “A Whole Night Without Knowing”, which denounced the control of the Hindu nationalist government of Narendra Modi in universities, cause you any problems?

The movie was not distributed in India, like most documentaries in my native country. Certainly, it circulated a lot in festivals, it was screened in film clubs and galleries in India. But it didn’t weigh much, compared to all the propaganda films that the government supports, real blockbusters conveying false ideas, particularly Islamophobic ones – I remember a scenario with a Muslim character who had twelve wives… In Cannes in May, the Indian pavilion presented a few works of this genre.

Are these propaganda films successful in India?

Yes, because they are very well produced. People get into the stories all the better, which is problematic. At the International Film Festival of India in Goa in 2022, filmmaker Nadav Lapid, who chaired the jury, triggered a diplomatic incident by deploring, during the closing ceremony, the presence of the film in competition The Kashmir Filesby Vivek Agnihotri [lequel revisite avec un certain nombre d’inexactitudes l’exode des hindous du Cachemire dans les années 1990, sous la pression d’extrémistes musulmans].

“All We Imagine as Light” paints a portrait of an inhospitable city, Bombay. Your female characters come to seek freedom, while forbidding themselves from things…

Bombay is a paradoxical city. It is undoubtedly easier to find work there, but the days are long and there is little social regulation. The character of Parvaty, a cook and undocumented resident, lives in a building threatened with destruction, on the site of the old cotton mills. In the past, workers lived there on a community basis. Then the workshops closed, giving way to shopping centers. I’m not saying that these workers’ homes were comfortable, but these people had to leave the city.

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