Payal Kapadia

Payal Kapadia (b. 1986) is an Indian filmmaker based in Mumbai whose work engages with memory, labour, political violence, and everyday experience. A Night of Knowing Nothing (2021), her debut feature documentary, won the Golden Eye at Cannes, constructing an essay film from student protest footage and love letters that placed contemporary political activism within a meditation on historical memory and loss. Her fiction feature All We Imagine as Light (2024) received the Grand Prix at Cannes — the first Indian film to receive a major Cannes award in three decades — a quietly devastating account of two nurses navigating love, solitude, and labour in a city of contradictions.