‘Women are made to feel as if they’re against each other’: the hit Indian film that challenges the patriarchy

There is nothing ostensibly special about Mumbai, according to Payal Kapadia. There is no iconic building to photograph, no ancient history to mine. "It's a post-colonial city that didn't exist before the British came and joined seven islands, purely for capitalism."

But for the director, who has become one of Indian cinema's biggest names, there is a magic at the heart of the country's financial capital, one imperceptible to the naked eye. "Mumbai is defined by the people who travel from all across India to live and work there," Kapadia says. "The city is in a constant state of flux."

The 38-year-old is in a jovial mood when we meet in London, before the UK premiere of her debut feature film, All We Imagine As Light, a dreamlike tale of two nurses navigating life and love in Mumbai. In May, it became the first Indian film in 30 years to play in competition at the Cannes film festival . Kapadia was the first female Indian director to be nominated for the Palme d'Or; she ended up with the coveted runners-up award, the Grand Prix .

Since then, her film has become one of the most theatrically distributed Indian independent titles ever. "I didn't quite expect the reaction it has received," she says. "It took many years to write, raise funding for and put together. So it felt a bit surreal when it won.

"One of the nicest results of winning is getting distribution in India, which is not easy for an independent movie. We don't have a version of the BFI. So while a lot of non-studio films or non-mainstream films are getting made, Indian film-makers really struggle with showing their work."

Kapadia was born in Mumbai in 1986 to an artist (the painter Nalini Malani ) and a psychoanalyst. She went to boarding school in Andhra Pradesh and returned to Mumbai for university. Her film dives deep into the lives of Prabha (Kani Kusruti) and her younger colleague and roommate Anu (Divya Prabha). Prabha – sensible, sensitive and lonely – is grieving the breakup of her marriage to a husband who emigrated and cut all communication, while Anu – playful and flighty – is causing a scandal with her not-so-secret relationship with her Muslim boyfriend. Meanwhile, the pair's friend, a hospital cook and widow called Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam), is being evicted from her home by bloodthirsty property developers.

But there is an additional character in the movie: the city. From a long opening shot documenting one of Mumbai's many bustling streets (accompanied by voiceover testimony from its residents) to the train doors opening and shutting to consume and expel commuters, plus monsoons coating pavements and high rises with a blue and purple sheen, the city is omnipresent yet mystical. As one character refrains, it is a place "that isn't real ...[where] you could vanish into thin air".

"I think, as artists, we are always just responding to the world around us," Kapadia says. "Every time I returned to Mumbai over the years, I started noticing changes and I became very concerned with the shape the city was taking – predominantly its gentrification and the overall mentality of its people. It used to be much more inclusive. But in the past 10 years, it's become very commercial. It's harder for those who don't have money to live there. Inequality has significantly increased."

This shift is told through her characters – women who work hard, but continue to live on the margins, struggling to make rent or live in desirable homes. Parvaty is eventually forced to quit her life and move back to her home village. It is here, amid the sea breeze, that each woman experiences her own epiphany – one that de-centres societal expectations in place of personal agency and fulfilment.

For Kapadia, it was particularly important to tell the story of these women's interior lives. "One of the things that really frustrates me about my country and culture is that women can be financially independent, and live independently from their family, sometimes in a whole new city, and yet so much of their daily life and choices are controlled by expectations – all the time being afraid of who you can love and marry," she says.

"I was thinking a lot about these contradictions. Western feminism tells me that financial independence is the goal and yes, I'm all for it. But in countries like mine, you need to go a step further. There needs to be a larger discourse about social dynamics." Prabha, for instance, has internalised society's misogyny and patriarchy to the extent that "she can't recognise that her friend Anu wants to make different choices", Kapadia says.

The film makes a point of conveying the litany of problems posed by men, despite their physical absence. In fact, male characters are presented as ghostly half-creatures who slip in and out of women's lives as persuasively and fleetingly as twilight.

This is no more stark than in an early scene in which an elderly patient tells Prabha she is being haunted by visions of her late husband. "The men are always there in some way; they linger," says Kapadia. "That scene actually comes from my grandmother. She would write in her diary about her husband coming to visit her, but he had died 55 years ago. Though she had been single for 50 years and she didn't even like him very much to start with, this guy still haunted her!"

But the men in the film are vulnerable, too. "I didn't want to divide this world into 'men – bad', 'women – good'," she says. "It's much more complex than that. Sometimes, even men suffer from patriarchy. The problem is the system, which is designed in a way that we'll all be miserable."

Instead, Kapadia's focus was on the strength of women when they come together. "In India, women are often made to feel as if they are against each other – mothers-in-law, daughters-in-law, sisters-in-law. We have a lot of soap operas like this. It's really unfortunate. I think it serves a purpose to some people for women not to be friends. But as I'm growing older, I find myself relying more and more on women of all ages."

Kapadia has an effortless way of showing kinship with other women. We joke about the perils of dating apps, spurred by Anu's use of a "matrimony app" in the film. During Kapadia's research, she was inspired by Agnès Varda's Cléo from 5 to 7 and Chantal Akerman's News Ffrom Home , shot in Paris and New York respectively. "Also the films of Claire Denis and Margaret Tait. I'm only naming women, because people are always naming men, but I'm not being dishonest, either."

Was it difficult, trying to make it as a female director in India? "I can't really say that my identity as a woman has caused me problems, because I'm much better off than a lot of other people," she says. "I had access to education from a young age. My family were really supportive of my career. I speak English well."

But there have been hurdles. In 2016, Kapadia was disqualified from a foreign exchange programme because she had participated in a students' strike against the proposed appointment of an actor turned politician as the chair of her film school. She also lost her scholarship, which had been awarded to students at the top of their class. The events were captured in her 2021 documentary, A Night of Knowing Nothing .

"Public university is a double-edged sword," she says. "On one hand, the university is affordable and it allows for a lot of people to have access to education, but it's also then controlled by the government and that can lead to problems."

She speaks ardently on the importance of access to the arts, calling it her "biggest frustration" when an artistic education is reliant on income: "I think opportunity, and having access to opportunity, is the only way we can move forward as humanity." She says artists from different backgrounds can produce more relatable stories: "And if you don't relate, at least you'll see something different, something that exposes you and perhaps makes you more empathetic to people who are not like you. Otherwise, we'll just be eating each other, completely ghettoised into our little bubbles."

Despite its success, All We Imagine As Light was snubbed by the Film Federation of India, the organisation responsible for deciding the country's official entry to the Oscars, which opted for a more conventional Bollywood effort. "The other film that got selected is a nice film," she smiles. "So I'm happy."

I ask her if artists have the freedom to do and make what they want in India. "Do artists ever have the freedom to do what they want?" she says. "On paper, the industry is free. But now, a lot of films that go with the government agenda are being given some subsidies, like tax benefits. They're released [more widely], the tickets are cheaper. So certain films get more attention than others."

The Bollywood actor Ayushmann Khurrana has said Kapadia will inspire others to "follow in her footsteps and think big" . Does she agree? "We've been making films for a long time in India," she says. "We have Bollywood, Tamil cinema, Malayalam cinema. Now, festivals are finally taking interest, so I guess the link between the east and west is opening up more. I'm just one small part of that."