India is ending its decades-long absence from the Palme d’Or this year with Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine As Lightlining up against the likes of Yorgos Lanthimos’ Kinds of Kindness and Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis for the major prize of the Cannes Film Festival.
Kapadia’s feature – which follows two nurses on a road trip to the beach as they try to chase their dreams and escape their domestic dilemmas – is the first film selected from the country since 1994 to be in the running for the Palme d’Or. News thatAll We Imagine as Lightlanded in the competition lineup made waves inIndia, where its ascension was seen as confirmation of the increased international reach ofIndian cinema a year after the global hitRRRwon the Oscar for best original song and helped redefine the conversation about how far the country’s cultural exports could travel.
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But forIndian industry insiders who have waited 30 years since Shaji N. Karun’sSwaham (My Own)for a chance at Palme d’Or glory, awards recognition and persuading global audiences to seeIndian-produced films are just a couple of pieces of the equation. Making the case to foreign filmmakers about the benefits of shooting inIndiaalso is top ofmind.
At Cannes this year,Indiais pitching itself as a location for international productions hoping to take advantage of the country’s exotic locales, more affordable labor costs, and its workforce that has plenty of experience making movies. Among its selling points is a revised Film inIndiaincentive plan that now offers as much as a 40 percent rebate for spending that tops out at $3.6 million.
“Indiahas all the right resources for the international producers to consider basing their next production, be it a live shoot or animation project or just for production services like visual effects and animation,” says Sanjay Jaju, secretary to the Government ofIndia, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting.
The Film inIndiaplan launched at Cannes two years ago with a cap of $3 million, with increased incentives introduced in December. Jaju says this jump already “has attracted many productions” to the country.
Among them isAll We Imagine as Light, which joins two otherIndian co-productions screening in competition at Cannes this year: the Sandhya Suri-directed dramaSantosh(Un Certain Regard) and Karan Kandhari’s dark comedySister Midnight(Directors’ Fortnight). Meanwhile, students from the Film and Television Institute ofIndiaare behindSunflowers Were the First Ones to Know, which will screen in the student-centric La Cinef section of Cannes.
Santoshis set in the northernIndian countryside around the city of Lucknow. It stars Shahana Goswami as a widowed woman who is offered her dead husband’s job as a cop. Initially, the British-based filmmakers were not sure how they could pull off such a film.
“Santoshwas always destined to be a challenge because it is a predominantly U.K. production from a U.K. director and U.K. producers,” says producer Mike Goodridge of Good Chaos, one of the companies behind the movie. “So how was that team going to make a film effectively inIndiain Hindi with anIndian cast andcrew?”
The answer, Goodridge says, was its partnership with the Mumbai-based Suitable Pictures, which boarded the feature to help the team navigate shooting in thecountry.
“Our hurdles were swiftly overcome and we were able to enter production with relative speed and efficiency,” says Goodridge, who also worked with BBC Film and Razor Film on the project.
Sister Midnight, meanwhile, is set in Mumbai and is described as a “punk comedy, a feminist revenge film, and a revamped vampire movie rolled into one.” It follows the travails of a young woman (Radhika Apte) trapped in an arranged marriage. Along the way, she discovers that life in a Bombay slum is not what she wants and finds that she has a thirst for revenge.
“Filming inIndia, in the world’s most active film industry,was both an exciting and daunting prospect,” said Anna Griffin, the project’s U.K.-based executive producer who is representing Wellington Films on the movie. “We worked very closely with our production partners, and it was clear from the very beginning that the team they were building around the project had a passion for independent filmmaking and sensibilities in production that aligned with ours.” Its backers include the U.K.’s Film4 and BFI, while its producers include Radhika, Suitable Pictures, and AlanMcAlex.
These projects were made thanks to a co-production agreementIndiahas with France. In addition,Indiahas co-production agreements with 15 other countries: Australia, Bangladesh, Brazil, Canada, China, Germany, Israel, Italy, New Zealand, Poland, Portugal, South Korea, Russia, Spain and the U.K.
In recent years, notable features shot in the country have included the Chris Hemsworth starrerExtraction 2(2023), which is part of arguably Netflix’s most important action franchise, and the Oscar-nominated featureThe White Tiger(2020), which also streamed on Netflix.
Officials are hoping to up the number of big films such as these, but also smaller projects.
In the two years since Film inIndiawas announced, it has been revised a dozen times in the hope of bringing in more interest. In addition to the financial incentives, a key selling point is what government officials call a “single window” permission system that allows producers to bypass complicated bureaucracies to film at locales such as ancient desert forts, colorful festivals, and cinematic beaches.
“We have taken steps to ease the process of application for filming permits and provide a single-window system for the whole country through an enhanced web portal for the Film Facilitation Office,” says Prithul Kumar, who serves as joint secretary (films), Ministry of Information and Broadcasting and managing director of the National Film Develop Council ofIndia.
TheIndian film industry produces as many as 2,000 features a year, something foreign producers say speaks to the amount of qualified crew available for work on productions.“Filmmaking is in the DNA ofIndia, so we were tapping into a continentwide tradition,” notesSantoshproducer Goodridge.
Kumar is particularly pleased that a few of the films recently shot inIndiaare getting recognition this year at Cannes. “It is heartening to have moreIndian projects in the Cannes official selection this year,” says Kumar, noting that two of them “have been beneficiaries of the support of the government interms of incentives and as official co-productions.”
