Payal Kapadia on the Elusive Nature of Truth in Cinema: In Conversation with Amit Madheshiya

Transgressions—this is what draws me to Payal Kapadia’s work. Her first film, A Night of Knowing Nothing (2021), bends form and categories, darting between fiction and non-fiction almost promiscuously. It resides in the land of wickedness—a narrow strip between the boundaries of fiction and non-fiction—distancing its audience from objective truth while drawing them closer to another reality. Perhaps an imagined one, or the one we can feel subdermally. Several filmmakers explore and enrich this land, notably Jean Rouch, Chris Marker, Jon Bang, Sarah Polley, and Miguel Gomes.

Kapadia’s latest film All We Imagine As Light inhabits a reality that city-dwellers are painfully aware of: loneliness, longing, and alienation while surrounded by milling masses and negotiating unsaid desires in a megacity with little space to yield to lovers. Kapadia’s work resonates with me because it is urgent and about Mumbai, my homeland and reality that I try hard to comprehend  

In my interview with Kapadia, we talked about the complexities that arise with transgressions of the form. Are fiction and nonfiction as distinct as we take them to be? In the case of osmosis between the two, does one illuminate the other or corrupt it?  And finally, do we abolish all kinds of categorization and amalgamate a monolith of Cinema?

Payal Kapadia is an Indian filmmaker. Her debut feature A Night of Knowing Nothing (2021) won the Golden Eye award for best documentary film at the Cannes Film Festival. This year, her fiction feature debut All We Imagine as Light became the first Indian film to win the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival, and has recently won the Gotham Independent Film Award for Best International Feature and the New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best International Film.

Amit Madheshiya is a Cannes award-winning documentary filmmaker, and World Press Photo-winning photographer. His films have been supported by numerous organizations, including Sundance Institute, Pulitzer Center, and MacArthur Foundation. Madheshiya is a current fellow of the Diane Weyermann fellowship and a member of the Documentary Branch of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.