Payal Kapadia

Biography:

Payal Kapadia (born 1986) is a prominent Indian filmmaker known for her acclaimed works in cinema. Her short film Afternoon Clouds (2017) was the sole Indian entry at the 70th Cannes Film Festival. In 2021, she received the prestigious Golden Eye award for Best Documentary Film at the 74th Cannes Film Festival for her debut feature, A Night of Knowing Nothing.

In 2024, Kapadia achieved further recognition by winning the Grand Prix at the 77th Cannes Film Festival for her fiction feature debut, All We Imagine as Light, which also earned her a Golden Globe nomination for Best Director.

Born in Mumbai, Kapadia is the daughter of painter and video artist Nalini Malani and psychoanalyst Shailesh Kapadia. She attended Rishi Valley School, Andhra Pradesh, where she first encountered avant-garde filmmakers like Ritwik Ghatak and Andrei Tarkovsky through the school’s film club. Kapadia pursued her undergraduate studies at St. Xavier’s College, Mumbai, followed by a one-year master’s degree at Sophia College. In 2012, she was accepted into the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) to study film direction on her second attempt. Prior to this, she spent five years in Mumbai working in advertising and assisting a video artist.