At Cannes, The Colours Of Palestine

The red carpet and the eight-minute standing ovation at Cannes could just be the hors d’oeuvre. ‘All We Imagine As Light’, written and directed by Payal Kapadia and with our own Kani Kusruti as one of its stars, could well go on to win the prestigious Palme d’Or. The movie is up against heavyweight contenders, including films from the likes of Francis Ford Coppola (Megalopolis), Yorgos Lanthimos (Kinds of Kindness), Paul Schrader (Oh, Canada), David Cronenberg (The Shrouds) and Andrea Arnold (Bird).

As it is, All We Imagine… is the first Indian movie in 30 years to qualify for the Cannes festival’s competition section after Shaji Karun’s Swaham. It was not just the critics who were impressed at the world premiere of the movie at Cannes on Thursday -the eight-minute standing ovation at the end of the film’s screening was definitely among the longest of this edition of the film festival.

Payal Kapadia and the cast of her film also made a fashion statement. On the red carpet on the steps of Palais du Festival, Kani Kusruti stood out with her watermelon clutch: The green and red clutch was literally designed like a cut section of the fruit but what it alluded to was the most important thing – Palestine and Gaza and the unfolding horror there. It was Kusruti’s bold statement in support of Palestine.

On her part, Divya Prabha seemed to be making a counterpoint to her character in the film with her classy copper-hued gown, while Hridu Haroon, in a mundu and kurta, completed the ethnic-symbolic ensemble. Kapadia and her co-producer/cinematographer, Ranabir Das settled for formal black.

All We Imagine…, an internationally produced Malayalam-Hindi feature, is about Prabha, a nurse, and her younger roommate Anu. The movie hinges on a road trip that the two nurses go on to a beach town “where the mystical forest becomes a space for their dreams to manifest”.

International critics have gone gaga over the movie. Sample some of the praise: Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian raved about its “freshness and emotional clarity” and compared Kapadia’s “fluent and absorbing” storytelling with Satyajit Ray in his classics, Mahanagar and Aranyer Din Ratri. Sophie Monk-Kaufman of IndieWire wrote: “This casual everyday vignette is brimming with a sensuality (the rain, the clothes, the food, the women) that people don’t tend to notice when caught up in the rhythm of life. It takes a snapshot from a photographer removed from the situation to make you realise how full these moments are.” In the words of Fionnuala Halligan, “This fiction debut from a talented documentarian brings to mind the work of Lucrecia Martel or Alice Rohrwacher, yet there’s a strong romantic streak that also calls to mind Wong Kar-wai’s great love affair with the city of Hong Kong.”

Jordan Mintzer of The Hollywood Reporter was similarly euphoric: “All We Imagine As Light is about as far as you can get from the stylistics of Bollywood’s masala musicals, even if there is one short and memorable impromptu dance scene toward the end. And yet its story of women looking for love and happiness in a calamitous world brings to mind those popular Mumbai-set movies, in which heroines suffer plenty of heartbreak before things eventually work out,” he gushed.
All We Imagine As Light is an Indo-French co-production between Petit Chaos from France and Chalk and Cheese Films from India.

(With inputs from PTI and IANS)