Hirokazu Koreeda Talks Filmmaking With Payal Kapadia

Hirokazu Koreeda confessed he had wanted to have an in-depth talk with Indian filmmaker Payal Kapadia ever since he saw her film All We Imagine as Light at the Cannes Film Festival this year. On Tuesday, the Japanese auteur finally got his chance as part of the intimate TIFF Lounge talk series held during Tokyo Internation Film Festival at the plush Lexus Cafe.

All We Imagine as Light is Kapadia’s second full length feature after her 2021 debut, the documentary A Night of Knowing Nothing. Her sophomore feature has been an international critical sensation and was the first Indian film to compete in Cannes’ main competition in 30 years. The film ultimately won the French festival’s Grand Prix, the second most prestigious award. In recent weeks, All We Imagine as Light has been in the news again, as the film was widely expected to be India’s submission to the 2025 Academy Awards in the best international film category. In a shocking turn of events, Kiran Rao’s Laapataa Ladies was chosen by The Film Federation of India, with the selection causing a fierce backlash in the country.

Koreeda was sitting on Cannes’ main competition jury this year, and he began Tuesday’s talk by admitting that due to a strict NDA he cannot reveal the judges’ deliberations, or how he voted. But he wryly confessed that ever since Cannes, he was very much looking forward to talking to Kapadia and learning more about her work and process. The following is an edited transcript of the conversation between Koreeda and Kapadia as well as a selection of questions and answers from the audience.

KOREED: How was Cannes for you?

KAPADIA: We didn’t expect that the film would be in competition. It was a film that I’ve been making for many years and, [and the feeling of being in Cannes] was very new to me. It was just nice to have the film [in competition] with so many filmmakers who I watched in film school. These are the directors that I have [studied] myself, and there was the jury members, and others, [who we studied at] film school. I have to admit, I was very nervous. But I had my whole team with me and everybody had come from India, my actresses had come. When everybody is together, you feel a bit better. That’s why it was a nice feeling.

KOREEDA: In your own words, could you tell us what All We Imagine as Light is about?

KAPADIA: The film is about two women who are from the southern state of Kerala, and they are living and working in Mumbai. They are roommates, but I wouldn’t really call them friends, you know, because sometimes you become roommates by chance, the one who want their history and then somebody comes and stays. So it’s like by chance friendship between two people who are of slightly different generations. There is Prabha who’s almost 40 then there is Anu who’s like in her mid-twenties. The film is about each of them being in impossible love situations, not with each other, but with the two different people. And it’s kind of a film about friendship and finding your own kind of family. When you know, in India, a family is a complicated entity. It’s something [that can be] supportive also, but it can also be bringing you down sometimes. And so the film is about a family that you make when you go away from your own family.

KOREEDA: When you presented the film in Cannes, I loved it. The situation that the characters is quite severe, the way you tell the story is calm, and not too loud. In a way, you show your sympathies for the characters, and in the competition in Cannes, that really stood out. There were a lot of very loud films. Your film has the strongest power to convey your message. With all of your three films, the voices and sounds of the characters are very important.

KAPADIA: The sound for me is how films affect me very physically. We don’t need to be very loud [in films]… I like to [give that] feeling as if somebody is talking into your ear, sitting next to you in a gentle way, not very far away from you. And this is what I like about films that you can have a long shot, a very wide shot, but the voice can be still intimate, and in cinema, we can do that. Which is something that I enjoy very much in films, that voices can create intimacy even in a large shot and that can bring you very close to the characters, even if we are very far away. Sometimes I think that I don’t want to go too close physically to the characters, I find myself being a little far away. But with the voice, I don’t feel like that, I feel like being close and listening and being very soft [with the talking]. And I think that is something in cinema we can do and it’s the fun, it’s the joy of making films that we have these choices — I like that a lot.

KOREEDA: I feel like your films have a strong philosophy behind them, could you talk about that?

KAPADIA: I like to make films that are not very big… because I think everyday life has a lot of drama, we don’t need to look outside too much. [These are the] kind of stories that I like. When we were students at film school, we were reading some Japanese short stories by Yasunari Kawabata. One of my teachers introduced us to this story called Palm-of-the-Hand Stories from Kawabata, which were just one-page stories. And I like very much how he was writing that. It was so deceptively simply like very daily, but it was so many things that were covered in just 3-4 paragraphs and went from history, past dreams, realities, anxieties, happiness. I felt very liberated reading those very short stories, thinking that you can actually talk about a lot of things with very little. This process [is] a very painful [way for] my teacher to introduce me to works like this which are again, deceptively simple, but there is a lot of layers in it which the juxtaposition creates. I don’t know if that answers your question, but it’s how I like to think about things.

Question from the audience: Your film was widely anticipated to be India’s submission to the Oscars this year. And if it had been selected, I think it was a very good chance that it would be nominated. So I wonder what your thoughts about why the film was not selected?

KAPADIA: Thank you for your question. I think with this film, it got a lot already. I’m very satisfied with how the journey of the film has gone. And it’s been really more than I expected at all. So everything that comes its way, it’s like a bonus for me.

Question from the audience: When I saw the film, the one thing that got the audience quite [confused] and I was so confused because there are so many languages in the movie, but you couldn’t tell because we don’t know all the different languages. I heard that when the film was shown that some of [languages] were color coded. How many languages were there?

KAPADIA: India is a country that has like, I don’t know, 26 official languages or 20-something like this. Everybody speaks a different language. We are a very multilingual country and Mumbai is a city where you will hear a lot of languages. So it’s very much part of our culture that we don’t speak each other’s language, and then we all have to speak another language to be able to understand each other. And this is an experience of Mumbai that I had, and I felt that I needed to talk about the city with its multilingual quality. I like the diversity that there is with language in our country, and the desire to make it [one language] for me is doesn’t quite work. So in the film also, I wanted to have multiple languages to be authentic to that diversity. [We have] Malayan, Hindi, Marathi as the primary languages, but there are also in the beginning when you will hear the documentary voices, they are in Gujarati… If you travel by train in Mumbai, you will hear all these languages.

 I am really interested in the relationship I have with languages because it can be something that if you move to a big city and you don’t speak the language, it adds to that feeling of distance, the feeling of being alienated in conversations and the film was about that as well. So all the characters in the film who can’t speak Hindi, it becomes a kind of distance, [a feeling of] not being connected to the place. But language is also a way that we can create privacy where I suppose will be you and me can speak the language and we are in a public space and then we can say the most intimate thing and no one will understand.

But there is also the matter of cities and language that I just love. So with all my friends, I have a lot of languages. I just have to figure out a better way to subtitle. I’m figuring it out.

The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.