Coolidge Breakthrough Artist Award Honoring Payal Kapadia

Special preview screening of the new film All We Imagine as Light followed by Q&A with filmmaker Payal Kapadia. 

The Coolidge Breakthrough Artist Award was established in 2023 to celebrate the bold and innovative film artists who represent the future of cinema. Our 2025 honoree is visionary writer/director Payal Kapadia, who will join us for a special preview screening of her acclaimed new film All We Imagine as Light. 

Kapadia’s stunning, lyrical portrait of the lives of three women in contemporary Mumbai won the Grand Prix at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival and was recently named the #1 film of the year by The New York Times and the prestigious Sight and Sound Year End Critics’ Poll. 

After the screening, Kapadia will participate in a Q&A and be presented with The Coolidge Breakthrough Artist Award.

ABOUT ALL WE IMAGINE AS LIGHT 

The light, the lives, and the textures of contemporary, working-class Mumbai are explored and celebrated with a vivid, humane richness by Payal Kapadia, who won the Grand Prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival for her revelatory fiction feature debut. Centering on two roommates who also work together in a city hospital—head nurse Prabha (Kani Kusruti) and recent hire Anu (Divya Prabha)—plus their coworker, cook Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam), Kapadia’s film alights on moments of connection and heartache, hope and disappointment to create a soulful study of the transformative power of friendship and sisterhood, in all its complexities and richness. 

ABOUT PAYAL KAPADIA 

Payal Kapadia is a Mumbai based filmmaker. She studied Film Direction at the Film & Television Institute of India. Her short films Afternoon Clouds and And What Is The Summer Saying premiered respectively at the Cinéfondation and the Berlinale. Her first feature film A Night of Knowing Nothing premiered at 2021 Director’s Fortnight, where it won the Golden Eye for best documentary. Her second feature All We Imagine as Light premiered in Cannes 2024 in Official Competition, where it won the Grand Prix.