Short Trip to Cannes

Thanks to Payal Kapadia, India’s presence at the Cannes Film Festival won’t be restricted to the usual red carpet appearances by Bollywood celebs. A student at the Film & Television Institute of India (FTII) in Pune, Kapadia will travel with Afternoon

Clouds, one of the 16 student short films in contention for the top prize in the Cinefondation category.

Shot in 2016, the film follows the relationship between a 60-year-old widow and her domestic help from Nepal. Kapadia’s observations of the equation between her own grandmother and her help from Darjeeling have shaped the film. “While staying with her, I began to notice a few daily rituals and conversations,” she says. “I was interested in the notions of love that two single women have at different ages and points in their life. Women in India cannot speak about these matters very openly. I wanted to explore these emotions with gestures and silences.”

Daughter of painter and video artist Nalini Malani, Kapadia was raised on a diet of experimental and independent films at home as well as at her boarding school, Rishi Valley, where the film club introduced her to filmmakers like Ritwik Ghatak and Andrei Tarkovsky. Kapadia was all praise for FTII, whose campus has seen a surge of student protest in the last few years. “FTII has really shaped the way I look at my practice,” she says. “It allowed me to question myself through my work without any kind of pressure. I have been able to continue my experiments in cinematic forms. I am interested in different forms of storytelling that combine reality, myth and memory.”

The Cannes selection isn’t the first feather in Kapadia’s cap. Her earlier film, The Last Mango Before the Monsoon, won the FIPRESCI Prize at the International Short Film Festival of Oberhausen (2015) and also Best Film at the Mumbai International Film Festival (2016). At Cannes, she’s hoping to catch a few in competition titles, particularly entries by one of her favourite filmmakers, Naomi Kawase. “The line-up this year is really very good,” she says.