Watch ‘All We Imagine as Light’ Director Payal Kapadia Share Her Picks from the Criterion Closet

The auteur took the opportunity to showcase her love for Pier Paolo Pasolini and Aki Kaurismäki and explain why Chris Marker's "Sans Soleil" is a film everyone should see.

For a filmmaker on the rise, few honors are more exciting than an invitation to the legendary Criterion Closet. The latest auteur to share their picks is Payal Kapadia, the visionary director behind “All We Imagine as Light,” who stopped by the famed closet to pick up Blu-rays from some of her favorite directors. She took the opportunity to opine on everyone from Pier Paolo Pasolini to Aki Kaurismäki, explaining how her distinct style is a product of her truly global taste in film. Watch the video below.

Kapadia’s extensive knowledge of cinema should come as no surprise. In a recent interview with IndieWire’s Anne Thompson, the auteur explained that years of following the arthouse and festival ecosystem helped her cast the film’s two leads, Divya Prabha and Kani Kusruti.

“They are quite well-known in the arthouse cinema circuit in Kerala in the South,” Kapadia said. “They do quite a few films that travel to festivals, but also get shown in the country. Not big films, but interesting scripts. So I had already seen their work.”

“All We Imagine as Light” premiered at the 2024 Cannes filmmaking, where critics heaped praise on Kapadia’s poetic filmmaking.

“The beats of ‘All We Imagine as Light’ are calibrated with hypnotic grace creating a rhythm that induces pure pleasure,” Sophie Monks Kaufman wrote in her IndieWire review. “No mystery of the human heart will reveal itself until the scene that naturalistically brings it to the surface. With her editors, Clément Pinteaux and Jeanne Sarfati, Kapadia uses the city as punctuation between the events of her character’s lives. From lights that spread out like a carpet of electronic stars to Anu and Shiaz standing together as the motions of a commuter train rock them into grazing contact, these are the lulls that cast a spell on our senses. There are enough crowd scenes to convey the scale and potential for chaos within a population of 15 million, still, the principle characters are usually able to find pockets of space and time to relax into who they are. This city symphony is a far cry from the usual trope of Mumbai as a noisy, stressful, disorderly hub; Kapadia doesn’t pretend that this aspect isn’t at play, she simply finds transfixing patterns, thus making her an ideal tour guide while she situates characters as tiny moving parts within a great engine.”