‘All We Imagine As Light’: Read The Screenplay For Payal Kapadia’s Cannes Grand Prix Winner

Deadline’s Read the Screenplay series continues with All We Imagine as Light, from Indian filmmaker Payal Kapadia. The film was awarded the Grand Prix at this year’s Cannes Film Festival after becoming the first Indian film to appear in competition there in 30 years.

The movie chronicles the experiences of three women of different generations living in modern-day Mumbai. After winning at Cannes, the film played film festivals at Toronto, San Sebastian and Busan among others, and was the opening-night film of the Mumbai Film Festival. It was released theatrically in India by Rana Daggubati’s Spirit Media, which gave the film an Oscars-qualifying run in the state of Kerala, and it hit U.S. theaters in November via Sideshow and Janus Films, giving the distributor team behind Drive My Car and EO it’s best-ever opening at the box office.

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In a conversation with Japanese auteur Hirokazu Kore-eda at the Tokyo Film Festival in October, Kapadia said the film had been well received so far by Indian audiences, “but these were cinephile audiences. Now the film is in cinemas, I hope the wider audience likes it, because it raises questions that it’s good to raise in our country. How these questions land is always complicated. But that doesn’t mean we should stop asking them and expressing feelings about the society we live in. After all, that’s our job and I hope people respond in the way it’s intended.”

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Kapadia also addressed how All We Imagine as Light was not selected by India’s Oscars committee as its submission for the Best International Feature category. That went to Kiran Rao’s Laapataa Ladies instead.

“With this film, we got a lot already, so I’m very satisfied with how the journey of the film has turned out,” she told Kore-eda. “It’s already much more than I expected. Anything that comes my way is more than I expected.”

Check out the script below.

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