Masterclass Payal Kapadia: All We Imagine As Light
With thanks to BOZAR, we are delighted to welcome Payal Kapadia to Antwerp on Thursday March 5th for an exceptional afternoon.
Following a screening of ALL WE IMAGINE AS LIGHT—introduced briefly by Kapadia—there will be a masterclass. Paolo Silvio Harald Favero (Universiteit Antwerpen), Professor of Visual Culture and Anthropology and a specialist in Indian visual culture, will join Kapadia in conversation about her filmmaking practice: her hybrid approach, and the political and poetic registers in which her cinema moves.
Her husband Ranabir Das (producer, cinematographer, and editor) will also take part. He served as cinematographer and co-producer on both ALL WE IMAGINE AS LIGHT and A NIGHT OF KNOWING NOTHING.
Programme
- 14:15-16:20 — Screening of ALL WE IMAGINE AS LIGHT (with a short introduction by director Payal Kapadia)
- 16:30–17:30 — Masterclass with Payal Kapadia & Ranabir Das
In ALL WE IMAGINE AS LIGHT,, Payal Kapadia’s acclaimed fiction debut, we follow nurse Prabha and her roommate and colleague Anu. They hold radically different views on life and love. Prabha is estranged from her husband, who lives and works in Germany, while Anu is secretly involved with a Muslim man.
When Prabha’s husband reaches out again after a long silence, her quiet life in Mumbai is thrown off balance. Prabha has settled into a modest routine, while the younger Anu dares to want more. When their colleague, the widowed Parvaty, is evicted from her home by a construction company and forced to return to her native village, the three women travel together to a coastal town to help her start over. In this new setting, they discover a space where desires can finally be voiced. With its beautiful cinematography by Ranabir Das—and an extraordinary final sequence that lingers long after the film ends—ALL WE IMAGINE AS LIGHT shows that family is not only defined by blood, but can also be found among kindred spirits.
We will screen ALL WE IMAGINE AS LIGHT twice more afterwards: on Sunday 15 March and Tuesday 13 March. Kapadia’s docu-fiction A NIGHT OF KNOWING NOTHING is also part of our programme.
The FILM CLASS PASS is not valid for this screening.
Showtimes
All screenings have ended
On March 5, following the screening, director Payal Kapadia will engage in a conversation (± 60') with Paolo Silvio Harald Favero (UA), professor of Visual Culture and Anthropology and specialist in Indian visual culture, about her film practice.
Payal Kapadia emerged in 2024 as one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary Indian cinema. With ALL WE IMAGINE AS LIGHT, she won the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival—an exceptional accolade and a historic return of India to the main competition after a thirty-year absence. She was also the first Indian woman filmmaker to screen a film in the Cannes Competition.
Kapadia grew up in Mumbai and studied film direction at the Film and Television Institute of India in Pune. During and shortly after her studies, she made several short films that gained international recognition—work in which she already developed a layered, politically attuned film language, balancing documentary observation, poetry, and fiction.
Her talent surfaced early, and her short work laid the foundations for a cinema deeply rooted in Indian society—cinema that defies genres and blends political commentary and class struggle with folk myths and dreamlike escapes from reality. Her shorts, always poised between documentary, poetry, and fiction, travelled widely on the international festival circuit.
In the final phase of her studies, she began her first feature-length documentary, A NIGHT OF KNOWING NOTHING, which premiered in 2021 at the Quinzaine des Cinéastes, where it won the Œil d’Or (Best Documentary). Shortly afterwards she made her first fiction feature, ALL WE IMAGINE AS LIGHT, confirming her profile as an outspoken humanist filmmaker with a sharp eye for what rarely makes it on screen: labour, class, intimacy, and the quiet inequalities of city life.
