An Indian movie, loved abroad, is snubbed at home for Oscar submission

MUMBAI, India — There's a scene in All We Imagine as Light, where a middle-aged cook and a nurse, lit by the glare of streetlight, laugh and hurl rocks at a banner advertising a luxury development — the construction of which will raze the cook's home. Then the women bolt.

That cathartic protest — small in the face of the obstacle it must tackle — speaks to how this movie captures the mismatched odds between workers and the city they keep running. Directed by Payal Kapadia, the film also centers on the friendships between women who are otherwise alone.

Kapadia's skill in drawing out these themes has been widely acclaimed. Her film was the first from India to win the Grand Prix at Cannes since 1946, the second highest honor at the world's most famous film festival. The New York Times and The Associated Press called it the best movie of 2024; it won best international feature at the Gotham Awards.  

Those are just the highlights. But what that list doesn't include: the Oscars.

The international acclaim for All We Imagine as Light raised hopes that India might finally have a serious contender for an Oscar in the best foreign film category. And it was indeed considered by the Indian committee that selects a film to be the country's submission to the Oscars.

Deciding which movie should represent a country as vast and cinematically prolific as India is always difficult. Ultimately All We Imagine as Light was not selected, but the reason why generated much controversy: The judging committee felt that the film was not Indian enough.

Ravi Kottarakara, president of the Film Federation of India, the body that forms the jury to select India's submission — told Hollywood Reporter India that the jury felt it was like "watching a European film taking place in India." Perhaps he was referring to its broody light, the lingering shots, the story's gentle unfurling.

What defines a film as Indian?

"I'm at a loss on this," says director Kapadia. "I don't know how we can define what is Indian and what is not, but the actors are Indian. The entire crew was Indian," she says, except for one French citizen.

And so was the story's subject matter. The film follows three women living in Mumbai. Parvaty is trying to save her home with the help of Prabha, a stoic nurse — who is like an older sister to her roommate Anu, who's always late paying the rent. Anu has fled small-town life to live in Mumbai, but even here, she's harshly judged because she's Hindu and has a Muslim boyfriend in a place that abhors mixed-faith romance.

Mumbai, the city of more than 20 million people, is the other main character: A place where billionaires share the same streets with children who sleep on sidewalks. Mumbai is shown through the prism of these women. It's largely filmed in the darkness, through windows of apartments, buses and on train commutes to work, in pre-dawn and late-night darkness.

"I don't remember a film that has captured Mumbai as intimately as All We Imagine as Light," says Ankur Pathak, a Mumbai-based assistant director and writer. "From the houses that feel so lived in to just the struggles of working women."

Enter: the light

The light — of the movie title — literally enters the movie when the women leave Mumbai to help Parvaty resettle in her ancestral village. The break from the city helps each of the women find a way to shuffle alongside life's hardships.

But Kapadia's movie touches on uncomfortable themes for many Indians, most controversially, the sexual relationship between the Hindu protagonist, Anu, and her Muslim boyfriend, Shiaz.

For years, the ruling Hindu nationalist party, BJP, led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, has accused Muslim men of luring Hindu women to Islam through relationships, an unfounded conspiracy that is nevertheless widely-believed and is known as "love jihad." Nearly a dozen of India's 29 states have introduced laws that ostensibly tackle this conspiracy by banning the use of marriage to pressure someone into converting.

Kapadia says she deliberately sought to explore how love is "a very political decision" in India by creating a relationship between two characters "that would face a lot of difficulty" but "in a very natural way — that they are actually just two people, two young people who had fallen in love."

It works, says Ankur Pathak, a screenwriter and assistant director. "You're … rooting for the love story and not being distracted by the political messaging."

Did Cannes victory lead to a backlash?

But screenwriter Pathak doesn't think Kapadia's exploration of controversial relationships caused the Oscar snub. It was the film's languid sensibilities, he says. "The very fact that it won at Cannes," he says, shored up a preconception among Indian filmmakers that Kapadia's work was catering "to the European gaze."

For its submission to the Oscars, the film federation picked "Lost Ladies," by prominent female director Kiran Rao. It's a big-hearted movie about two brides who are mistakenly picked up from the train station by the wrong grooms — because they are both wearing similar veils covering their faces.

But the movie hasn't had the same international buzz as All We Imagine As Light, which film critic Anna Vetticad says is key for an Oscar win. "If you are choosing to send the film to the Oscars, then it makes sense for you to figure out which film you think has the biggest chance of winning," she says.

Lost Ladies did not make it to the shortlist of Oscar finalists.

Adding to the controversy, the all-male jury explained their choice of movie with a statement that began with, "Indian women are a strange mixture of submission and dominance."

Kottarakara, the film federation of India, told local media that the jury had meant to imply that Indian women are like Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth and fortune, and like Kali, the goddess of death, time and violence.

"Their description was quite ridiculous and condescending," says film critic Vetticat — condescending both to the movie that India selected to win an Oscar, she says as well as to the one it saw as not Indian enough.

With additional reporting by Omkar Khandekar