MP The politics were foregrounded in your 2021 film A Night of Knowing Nothing, which chronicled the 2015 FTII student strike. Your latest, All We Imagine as Light (2024) [exclusively on BFI Player from 17 February and released on BFI Blu-ray/DVD on 3 March], centres on three women working at a hospital in Mumbai and is no less political, but its subject matter is tackled more subtextually.

PK No one watched the first film. Well, a lot of students watched it but it didn’t get wider distribution. For this film, I wanted to continue saying what I wanted to say, but with a more enticing premise. It was a bit of a seduction! I wanted to depict normal people dealing with things we all have to deal with. In the society we live in, your religion, your caste, your class, your language, your region, your access to privilege – all these things come in the way of relationships. What the film proposes is that we look beyond those immediate identities. Love is one method, as cheesy as it may sound, but so is friendship. 

MP The film’s protagonist Prabha is gifted a rice cooker by her absent husband. It is framed as a kind of dissociative object, like an alien that has been beamed in from another world. There’s something generous in the gift, as well as something insulting. In the film, cooking is tied up with female identity as something women have to do, but also as an expression of love. It also goes unused.

PK I was thinking a lot about what gift her husband could send. When I was a student I saw an artwork called Samsung (1999) by Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries, a South Korean art collective that makes incredible text-based video art. It was about a woman who couldn’t have sex with her husband and had sex with Samsung instead. The particular Korean household dynamics it analysed were similar to Indian household dynamics. For a lot of Asian women, desire is not easy to express or talk about. We don’t have a vocabulary for saying “I love you”. How do you put desire into a system where it doesn’t exist, or supposedly where no one wants it to exist? The rice cooker made sense to me because rice is really common in India, but a cooker is representative of upward mobility. It’s not something that everyone can afford. The way they are advertised is also about perpetuating patriarchy: you get a rice cooker, you can make more food quickly for your family, and you can feed more people. Capitalism is going for our anxieties, and all these advertisements show women being better housewives and better mothers.

MP There are other instances in the film where you reveal the profound strangeness of technology. The scene where we see Anu’s potential suitors through a marriage app is fascinating. These men present themselves in glossy, hyper-stylised fashion alongside horses and cars in a way that’s both surreal and kind of pathetic

PK Marriage profiles are really common in India. It’s a thriving multi-million-dollar industry. Part of my research was that I made a fake profile as Anu, and I made my director of photography, Ranabir Das, my father. He started getting all these calls saying, “You haven’t finished your profile, please can you post your daughter’s picture?” That’s how I got access to some of these photos, which we then recreated in the film. I couldn’t have come up with some of them; people really shot themselves with a horse and car. It’s interesting how men present themselves to the women who they will be with for the rest of their lives. What do you want to put in frame? Mise- en-scène has a whole new meaning in this context. 

MP Mumbai is depicted as a place where you are always close to being forgotten. Everyone in the film is always being rushed, while workers and their businesses disappear in the blink of an eye. What informed your depiction of the city?

PK Mumbai is a very complicated city, but it’s also very basic. At the end of the day, our cities were built solely for commerce. There were a bunch of islands that the British East India Company wanted from the Portuguese because they had been thrown out of Surat as a trading port by the local king. They convinced King Charles II to marry Catherine of Braganza and get the islands as part of the dowry. They made it a port and city, inviting migrants from all over the country to work there. If the fundamental premise of a city is commerce and migration, navigating life within that is going to be difficult. Mumbai can be a very, very cruel city. There are no checks and balances to protect the rights of those who live there, but that commercial foundation has also helped to generate a form of safety for the women who live and work there. It is in a state of contradiction, of flux. There’s also gentrification within the city space, where public space gets taken away and people get booted.

MP  I loved the scene where a rock is thrown at a billboard advertising a new development. 

PK These billboards are all over Mumbai. They’ll say these audacious things, like, “Come live in the luxury of Zeus Towers or Cote du Jour”, because people can’t spell Côte d’Azur. Ridiculous. I have wanted to take a rock and throw it sometimes, so I put all my energy into the film! It’s like fine, make your damn building, but why are you sticking up your finger to the rest of the people?

MP The costumes are particularly fantastic; they come in so many different shades of blue. Why is there so much blue?

PK While I was writing the script, me and my DOP would go around the city and take pictures during the monsoon season. Most of Mumbai gets covered by these atrocious blue plastic sheets because it rains torrentially and you need to prevent leaking. I wanted to use this unpleasant shade of blue, but in a pleasant way. Every frame I wanted to be blue-favouring, with no yellow or green to balance it out. Your eyes are dying to see some green by the time we get to the countryside. We worked a lot with the production-design team, as well as the costume team, who came to me with 36 different kinds of blue. The characters don’t change costumes all that much, so those costumes have to be part of the mise-en-scène. I wanted to work with different textures of fabric to make it feel as if there were watercolours on the bodies or the characters.

MP In the second half of the film, we leave the city and go to the beach, where the world takes on an increasingly mystical quality.

FA Even in the city sequences, I was trying to break reality, whether it be the hugging of the rice cooker or some of the sounds and noises. I wanted to perpetually switch between subjectivity and objectivity, a real world and an evoked world. I wanted to go from this super neorealistic, verité exposition to something so internal it feels like a dream. Even the lensing of the film changes from wide angles to shots that come so close, we almost go inside the mind. In the second half, you start seeing sunlight in this dappled, diffused way, almost bleached out at times. When Prabha saves the drowned man, the sunlight is gone but there’s still this strange overcast. It’s like when you know you’re in a dream and don’t know what time it is, or when you close your eyes and don’t have a sense of light. I tried to imagine light when I’m dreaming. I wanted to conjure a feeling of really expanded time, like a dream.

MP The sound adds to this dreamlike quality. The first half of the film is almost oppressively loud with city noise. When we arrive in the countryside, it’s alive with a completely different kind of noise. It reminded me of John Cage’s ideas about the impossibility of silence.

PK Sound is the fundamental of cinema for me. I was watching this Lucrecia Martel masterclass, and she spoke about cinema being a swimming pool, and sound being the waves. If you’re on one end of the pool and somebody jumps from the other end, you still feel the vibration of the waves. Sound is a physical thing, and I wanted to think of it as something tactile that goes into your ears, mind and heart, and makes you feel a certain way. The sound of the train is a constant in the city scenes, but when Prabha gets the rice cooker, the train sounds become harsher and screeching. Certain sounds have certain feelings for me. The sound of the rain and distant traffic on a wet highway feels similar to hearing the ocean far away. I try to think of all these rhythms and how they make me feel and then use them in a way that is more evocative than illustrative.

MP The sex scene with Anu is one of the most beautiful I’ve seen in any film. It makes an interesting counterpoint to the moment when she strips in front of Prabha, where her nudity is like an act of provocation, a riposte to Prabha’s conservatism.

PK I wanted the character to have some sort of agency when she was nude. Anu taking off her top was a way of arguing without speaking. Prabha is such a loser – she’s a nurse, man! She sees naked people all the time, but when her roommate changes, she turns around. I thought that Anu should use that as a kind of attack on her. When Anu has sex with her boyfriend, she keeps her bra on; it’s up to her, she’s not performing for us. The whole film is set up with her wanting to have sex, and so now that she’s doing it, it’s her joy. I wanted to stay with her and experience this moment with her.

MP There are certain beautiful needle drops from Ethiopian pianist and composer Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou in the film. She was classically trained but her compositions often flitted between Western scales and other musical traditions. It adds to that “butterflies in your stomach” feeling.

PK I was introduced to her music by my editor Clément Pinteaux, a wonderful collaborator and filmmaker. We’d worked together before, so he was aware I like deceptively simple, unfussy compositions. One afternoon we listened to her music, and it made me feel the delight of starting to love someone. It’s that breathless feeling of excitement where time flies and a city is more beautiful that day, even though it’s a crap city every day. You’re riding the regular bus, but that day, you’re sitting with somebody and holding hands in the darkness under the seat. .