This year it became the first Indian film ever to win Cannes’s second-place Grand Prix, not to mention the first Indian film in the main competition in 30 years, so its snub for India’s selection for the best-international-film Oscar made headlines. (“A very nice film got selected, and it’s also by a woman filmmaker,” Kapadia states diplomatically of the fuss.)
On a brief pause from traveling the world with her film—which premiered in France in October before her first visit to the US for typical awards-route stops at film festivals in New York, Santa Barbara, and Mill Valley—the 38-year-old was home in Mumbai last month on the eve of Diwali. (She skipped the festivities to travel to Tokyo for a conversation with master Japanese filmmaker Hidekazu Koreeda.) With fireworks in the background, she spoke to Vogue about internalized patriarchy, her melding of fiction and nonfiction, and why she’s not finished making films in her hometown.
Vogue: This movie originated as a student film project, right?
Payal Kapadia: I wanted to make a film about intergenerational friendship and the unlikely friendships that we form in cities. Mumbai—like, I suppose, New York—is a city of people who are different from you, and you will be forced to interact, whether on the train or renting an apartment. That chance encounter is characteristic of only big cities. In India relationships always come down to identity, whether caste, class, or religious identity. But in cities, these relationships have the potential to become free of the baggage of these identities.
This is your first fiction feature, but you also incorporate aspects of nonfiction: The voices in the opening montage, for example, are based on interviews you conducted with Mumbai residents. What appeals to you about that blend?
Somehow, the juxtaposition of nonfiction with fiction makes the fiction more real. I like that you don’t know when exactly the fiction begins because the film starts with a symphony of voices of unseen people. Actually, if you look carefully at that sequence, you will see Anu in it. We don’t know yet that she’s a central character. You might think she’s just somebody sleeping on a train. My thought was that this is a city symphony formed of many voices and we are just plucking three strands out and following their journey. But we could very well have followed the strands of others. Chance encounters, seeing the lived life of somebody you pass on a train, knowing there is a whole other landscape inside a person—that is, for me, exciting.
