Indian director Payal Kapadia wrote history with her feature debut All We Imagine as Light by winning India its first Grand Prix, the second-highest coveted award at the at the just concluded 77th Cannes Film Festival. The film not only became the first Indian movie in 30 years to compete in the main Competition, since Shaji N Karun's Swaham (1994), Payal also became the first Indian woman to be nominated for the top prize Palme d'Or and the first Indian to win the Grand Prix. Hirokazu Koreeda announced her the winner on Saturday night in Cannes.
The climb to the top of the Pune's Film and Television Institute of India alumna, however, has been a difficult one.
As is the case with independent filmmaking in India, veteran artist Nalini Malani's daughter Payal Kapadia, too, received no institutional support from India and FTII, not until she was "disciplined and punished". An FIR was lodged in her name, among others, and her FTII grant was cut during her direction course. Payal faced disciplinary action after she boycotted classes to lead a four-month-long protest against the appointment of TV actor-turned-politician Gajendra Chauhan as the chairman of the institution.
The year 2015 saw one of the longest student protests in the history of Pune’s premier institute FTII, for 139 days, between June and October, against the purely “political” appointment of Gajendra Chauhan as the institute’s head. Payal was among those who led the protests. Chauhan was also known for his seedy roles in B-grade and C-grade films. The demand of the students were that an eligible person, with an understanding of and love for cinema, be made the head. Chauhan was not that person. His appointment was a political one. Many students boycotted their classes and took to the streets. Many were punished for the same. Thereafter, the FTII put in place a regime of restrictions to curb student unrest. Pune Police issued charge sheets against students, including Payal, of those arrested was cinematographer Vikas Urs. The case awaits trial in the court.
The Indian Express reported, "On August 5, 2015, the 68th day of the protest, while the students abandoned classes and made rousing speeches, Prashant Pathrabe, the then director of FTII issued a notice to the 2008 batch to vacate the hostel on the grounds of overstaying. An order of assessment of their film projects, which were mostly incomplete, was passed. Calling it 'irrational and unjustified', the students went to his office seeking answers. The students held Pathrabe captive and formed a human chain around the office. This was followed by a midnight crackdown by the police where five students were arrested. About 35 students were later named in the charge sheet. Kapadia was one of them. She was charged with disciplinary action, lost her scholarship and the opportunity to participate in the foreign exchange programme, alongside seven other students."
A year after the incident, in 2017, FTII decided to support her when her 13-minute film, Afternoon Clouds, was selected for Cannes. FTII director at the time, Bhupendra Kainthola, said they decided to support her after they “observed Kapadia being disciplined” on the campus.
“Our decision to support students or deny them scholarship previously was based on how their conduct has been on the campus,” Kainthola told Hindustan Times before adding, “Few days after the protest got over, many students came to me and said they never realised that their past actions will haunt them through their life. Some of them even cried and regretted their actions.”
From that protest was born such independent films of students as Prateek Vats’ ingenious absurdist satire Eeb Allay Ooo! (2019) and Payal Kapadia’s Cannes’ L’oeil d’Or-winning documentary A Night of Knowing Nothing (2021), which has these university protests as its backdrop, foregrounding a longing for a hopeful, ideal India.
Today FTII and India is claiming a piece of the pie that is Payal Kapadia's win at Cannes, but the making of Payal Kapadia is a French story. She has been consistently screening films at Cannes Film Festival and winning more often than not, achieving many a firsts for India. Her achievement of winning both The Golden Eye and the Grand Prix at Cannes is, perhaps, a singular such victory. Both her award-winning debut documentary and debut feature film are French co-productions.
In her award-winning documentary, A Night of Knowing Nothing, according to an Indian Express report, "the shadowy realities of other incidents that affected campus life is where Kapadia trains her lens – be it of the Dalit scholar, of the University of Hyderabad, Rohith Vemula’s suicide in 2015, FTII protests in the same year, where the students refused to accept actor-turned-politician Gajendra Chauhan as their chairperson, the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) protests next year or those at other universities around the country."
When her documentary had won at Cannes, Payal Kapadia asserted the need for public universities like FTII in a country like India, and told the Indian Express, “We owe a lot to public education to make us the filmmakers we are… Universities are spaces of freedom. This is why we needed to make this film. As students who have been part of them, it is our responsibility to protect what they stand for so that the next generation can benefit,” says Kapadia, whose win was cheered by the likes of Richa Chadha, Anurag Kashyap, Vikramaditya Motwane and Varun Grover.
Grand Prix winner All We Imagine as Light, starring Kani Kusruti, Divya Prabha, Chhaya Kadam and Hridhu Haroon and which has been shot by Payal's FTII batchmate and partner cinematographer Ranabir Das, “is about friendship between three women and oftentimes women are pitted against each other. This is the way society is designed and it is very unfortunate. But for me friendship is a very important relationship because it can lead to greater solidarity, inclusivity and empathy towards each other,” she added, as reported by The Indian Express.
At the 77th Cannes Film Festival this year, two other FTII students showcased their films. One is Payal Kapadia's batchmate Maisam Ali, who is the first Indian to have his film, the Ladakh-set and Harish Khanna-starrer In Retreat, screened in Cannes' sidebar ACID (Association for the International Distribution of Independent Cinemas) and doctor-turned-filmmaker Chidanand S Naik's Sunflowers Were The First Ones To Know, which bagged the La Cinef film school competition first prize.
Maisam Ali, however, had a mixed response towards the 2015 student protest. “During the FTII protest, I was doing dialogue project for my thesis film. While the student community eventually helped me, they first told me to stop the project. I said, you can’t tell me to stop my film because the protest was happening. For the dialogue exercise, we had to create our own set for the first time, call actors, arrange logistics, all those things take time, so I couldn’t cancel. I had a mixed feeling about the protest. Of course, in spirit and solidarity, I was with the protest because heads of educational institutions should be selected on the basis of merit not by political leanings. But I also felt the protest was going on for a long time, and I come from a normal middle-class family and we have to finish our courses, go out and work to earn money. I felt that a lot of people shouldn’t behave like privileged kids about classes being cancelled. But, then, all movements have these kinds of inner criticisms, in the larger spirit, of course, I was with the student’s protest,” says the 35-year-old Ladakhi filmmaker, for whom it was a dream to get into this “magical place called FTII where people are talking about dreams, stories and images.”
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