Payal Kapadia and cast of All We Imagine As Light shine at Cannes

PTI

Filmmaker Payal Kapadia and the cast of All We Imagine As Light shone bright at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival, as they took to the red carpet ahead of the film’s history-making screening in Cannes.

FTII student wins La Cinef Award

Indian film Sunflowers Were The First Ones To Know has been crowned the winner of the La Cinef Award for Best Short Film at the ongoing 77th edition of the prestigious Cannes Film Festival. Sunflowers Were The First Ones To Know is a student film, directed by Chidananda S Naik, who studied at FTII, Pune. The short film is based on a Kannada folk tale about an old woman who steals a rooster, and this pushes her village into perpetual darkness. The winner was awarded a prize money of 15,000 euros. Taking to X, FTII officials wrote, “FTII brings big honour to India. Our student film Sunflowers Were The First Ones To Know is the winner of La Cinef Award at the 77th Cannes Film Festival. Student director Chidananda S Naik received this prestigious award at Cannes on May 23.” Meanwhile, the third prize in the La Cinef competition went to another Indian film, Bunnyhood, directed by Mansi Maheshwar. IANS

Kapadia’s feature directorial debut, which was screened on Thursday night, is the first Indian film in 30 years and first ever by an Indian female director to be screened in the main competition of the prestigious film gala.

Kapadia and the film’s cast members, Kani Kusruti, Divya Prabha, Chhaya Kadam and Hridhu Haroon, were beaming with energy as they walked the Cannes red carpet. They were accompanied by cinematographer Ranabir Das, and producers Julien Graff, Zico Maitra, Thomas Hakim.

At the film gala, All We Imagine as Light, also written by Kapadia, competes for Palme d’Or alongside 19 other highly anticipated titles, including films from master directors like Francis Ford Coppola (Megalopolis) and Yorgos Lanthimos (Kinds of Kindness), Paul Schrader (Oh, Canada), David Cronenberg (The Shrouds) and Andrea Arnold (Bird). The last Indian movie to be selected for the main competition was Shaji N Karun’s 1994 film Swaham

All We Imagine as Light, a Malayalam-Hindi feature, is about Prabha, a nurse, who receives an unexpected gift from her long estranged husband that throws her life into disarray. Her younger roommate, Anu, tries in vain to find a private spot in the big city to be alone with her boyfriend.

One day the two nurses go on a road trip to a beach town, where the mystical forest becomes a space for their dreams to manifest,.

An alumna of the Film & Television Institute of India (FTII), Kapadia is best known for her acclaimed documentary A Night of Knowing Nothing, which premiered at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival’s Director’s Fortnight side-bar where it won the Oeil d’or (Golden Eye) award.