BETWEEN SHADOWS AND LIGHT

From joining a film club at boarding school to creating history at Cannes, Payal Kapadia's commitment to storytelling defies convention

- SAKSHI MEHTA

It all began as a lark. At boarding school, a teenage Payal Kapadia was only allowed to watch one film a week, on Saturdays. "The only reason I joined the film club was because it meant I could watch an extra movie every Friday," she laughs, reflecting on the fact that her entry into filmmaking was neither planned nor conventional. But soon enough, the club became much more; it introduced her to the vast world of cinema. Her curiosity was further sparked by a passionate Bengali professor who often screened films by auteurs like Satyajit Ray and Ritwik Ghatak.

"Those films were my entry point into another world. He would write notes about every film, and suddenly, cinema became more than entertainment - it became something to explore deeply," she says. Later, during college, attending film festivals like MAMI Mumbai, MIFF, and Experimenta exposed her to a wide variety of films. "From narrative shorts to purely visual works like Stan Brakhage's film where he painted directly onto celluloid, they all made me realise how endless the possibilities in cinema could be."

Her turning point came when she saw a collection of student films from the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII). "The range of storytelling was so striking, and it showed me that I didn't have to follow the rules of commercial cinema. That's when I thought maybe this is something I could do."

FINDING HER VOICE