Being in the competition was victory itself; the win is a big bonus: Filmmaker Payal Kapadia

financialexpress.com:

Payal Kapadia etched her name into the history of Indian cinema when she won the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival. Her Malayalam-Marathi-Hindi language film, ‘All We Imagine As Light’, beat stiff competition from such legendary directors as Francis Ford Coppola, Andrea Arnold, Mohammad Rasoulof, David Cronenberg and Jia Zhang-ke to land the coveted prize.

All the filmmakers who were in the competition were the ones whose films we used to watch at FTII. To see them and see them even watching our films was really too good. Being in the competition was victory itself. It was really a big bonus and privilege.

Ours was not a very big film compared to the other films. We submitted it and didn’t think it would be selected for the competition section. I thought, okay, I would be super happy if it were to be selected in Un Certain Regard section — where the competition is very tough. Then we got into the competition. I feel we are really privileged because the film got a lot of attention that we wouldn’t have otherwise received.  

The making of the film took a long time— some six years. When I was making my diploma film (Afternoon Clouds) I was staying with my grandmother in Mumbai and we had a nurse caring for her. That is how the story came along. My diploma film was a story about a hospital and the nurses who had come from Kerala to work in Mumbai and made the city their home. They were independent, but not quite independent. This was the idea then.

While the hospital occupation of the nurses and them being from Kerala are still there, the film is also about friendship and how these three women — nurses Prabha and Anu played by Malayalam actors Kani Kusruti and Divya Prabha and the hospital employee Parvaty played by