Please Send Payal's Film To The Oscars!

How wonderful it would be for all of us to watch the Oscar ceremony on March 2, 2025 and watch AWIAL win an Oscar, notes Aseem Chhabra.

On May 25, I sat in the huge Debussy Theatre in Cannes waiting to watch the film festival awards presentation broadcast on the giant screen. The actual ceremony would take place next door in the Grand Theatre Lumiere, where all the celebrities were present.

There had been a lot of buzz after the public and press screenings of Payal Kapadia's first narrative feature, All We Imagine as Light.

The reviews had been very strong, including a five-star rating by Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian (he described it as fluent and absorbing like Satyajit Ray's Aranyer Din Ratri) and an A score by IndieWire, known for very conservative film reviews.

A lot of people anticipated AWIAL to win a major award and it became more and more evident as the second-tier awards were announced.

Then it happened.

AWIAL received the Grand Prix, the second highest award at the Cannes Film Festival.

This was the first for an Indian film since 1946, when Chetan Anand's Neecha Nagar won the same recognition, although in those days Cannes did not have the Palme d'Or award.

Kapadia brought her three lead women actors -- Kani Kusruti, Divya Prabha and Chhaya Kadam -- on stage. The four women hugged and then Kapadia began to speak, when an usher showed her the side she should exit from.

'I am not done yet,' Kapadia said with a smile, as the audience laughed.

Yes, Kapadia is not done yet.

After the film received an eight minute-long standing ovation in Cannes, this fall's three major North American film festivals, held in Telluride, Toronto and New York, have all programmed AWIAL.

It is a rare achievement for an Indian film.

In 2020, in the midst of the pandemic, Chaitanya Tamhane's The Disciple played at the Venice, Toronto and New York festivals.

For the festival world, the trade analysts, bloggers and others in the circles that matter during the awards season, AWIAL is definitely the most recognised Indian film of 2024.

I just watched the film again at a press screening at the Toronto International Film Festival and there was applause at the end. Press screenings at TIFF rarely witness applause.

That is why I strongly believe that India must submit All We Imagine as Light as its official entry for Best International Film Oscar for 2025.

Earlier this week, Variety predicted that AWIAL had a definite chance of being one of the five nominated films in the Best International Film category.

If that happens, it would only be the fourth time for an Indian film to be nominated in that category. And that would be 22 years after Lagaan, the last Indian film to be selected in the elite group. To date, no Indian film has won the Best International Film Oscar.

The lead producers of AWIAL are French. As a co-production, the film has a lot of European financial backing.

That was expected, since it is hard for a specialised film with actors speaking in various Indian languages, including Malayalam, Marathi, Hindi, with a smattering of Gujarati and Bengali, to find funding in India.

But the film also has a few Indian producers tied to it. It has an entirely Indian cast. It is an Indian story about migrants in Mumbai, and their struggles, disappointments, love lives and the friendship between two nurses from Kerala and one from Maharashtra.

It is a beautiful, moving film, gorgeously shot by Ranabir Das (he also shot Kapadia's 2021 experimental documentary, the Golden Eye winner at Cannes: A Night of Knowing Nothing), narrated in an unhurried, poetic style, a story with characters rarely explored in Indian cinema.

AWIAL has not had a theatrical release in India, but that is just a minor detail and there is still time for that.

The Film Federation of India, the producers body that selects India's Oscar entry, has often made grave errors by selecting wrong films to represent India. Sometimes I sense they do not develop the correct strategy of selecting films that would have good chances of competing with the best of world cinema.

Look at their track record: Indian and Jeans, both directed by S Shankar; The Good Road instead of The Lunchbox, one of the most embarrassing decisions by FFI. Even sending Jallikattu instead of The Disciple made little sense.

Like AWIAL, The Disciple had a strong recognition amongst the global film community, after it won the Best Screenplay award at Venice. Plus, Mexican film-maker Alfonso Cuarón was its executive producer.

There were some other good Indian films this year, from Laapataa Ladies and Manjummel Boys to Kotttukkali. But I really hope this year, FFI does the right thing and picks AWIAL, instead of making a decision that would not serve Indian cinema well.

That night in late May, I sat in the Debussy Theatre as Kapadia delivered her acceptance speech. I held my phone in one hand making a video of the speech. But I was overjoyed and quite emotional as I was witnessing Indian cinema history being made.

How wonderful it would be for all of us to watch the Oscar ceremony on March 2, 2025, and have a similar combined experience if AWIAL wins the Oscar, or at least is in the running for the trophy.