For an up-and-coming filmmaker, few awards are more exciting than an invitation to the legendary Criterion Closet. The latest author to share his picks is Payal Kapadiathe visionary director behind “Everything we imagine as lightwho stopped by the famous closet to pick up Blu-rays from some of her favorite directors. Taking the opportunity to comment on everyone from Pier Paolo Pasolini to Aki Kaurismäki, she explained how her distinct style is a product of her truly global taste in film. See the video below.

Kapadia’s extensive knowledge of film should come as no surprise. In one recent interview with IndieWire’s Anne Thompsonexplained the auteur 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 art house cinema circuit in Kerala in the south,” Kapadia said. “They make a lot of films that travel to festivals, but are also shown in the country. No big movies, but interesting scripts. So I had already seen their work.”

“All We Imagine as Light” premiered at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival, where critics praised Kapadia’s poetic filmmaking.

“The beats in ‘All We Imagine as Light’ are calibrated with hypnotic grace that creates a rhythm that evokes pure pleasure,” Sophie Monks Kaufman wrote in her IndieWire review. “No mystery of the human heart will reveal itself until the scene that naturally 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 life. From light spreading like a carpet of electronic stars to Anu and Shiaz standing together as the motions of a commuter train rock them to grazing contact, this is the calm that enchants our senses.There are enough crowd scenes to convey the scale and potential for chaos within a population of 15 million , yet the main characters can usually find pockets of space and time to relax into who they are.This urban symphony is a far cry from the usual trope of Mumbai as a noisy, disorderly hub; Kapadia doesn’t pretend this aspect doesn’t come into play, she simply finds transfixing patterns, making her an ideal tour guide while placing characters like small moving parts in a big engine.”