Filmmaker Payal Kapadia to receive 2025 Breakthrough Artist Award

We are excited to announce that filmmaker Payal Kapadia is the 2025 Coolidge Breakthrough Artist Award honoree! Join us Thursday, January 9, 2025, at 7:00pm for a preview screening of her film All We Imagine as Light, followed by a Q&A and award presentation.

get tickets

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.

about the breakthrough artist award

The Coolidge Breakthrough Artist Award was established in 2023 to celebrate the bold and innovative film artists who represent the future of cinema. The 2023 honoree was Elegance Bratton (The Inspection) and the 2024 honoree was Jane Schoenbrun (I Saw the TV Glow).

 

This Week

  • Showcasing the best in documentary short films from around the world!

    Showtimes
  • A bold, iconoclastic take on one of the world’s most compelling stories, from filmmaker From Maggie Gyllenhaal and starring Jessie Buckley & Christian Bale.

    Showtimes
  • A frisky, feminine, film noir about psychoanalysis and many other things… 

    Showtimes
  • A father, accompanied by his son, goes looking for his missing daughter in North Africa.

    Showtimes
  • Among the most important documentaries ever made, The Thin Blue Line, by Errol Morris, erases the border between art and activism.

    Showtimes
  • Showcasing the best in live action short films from around the world!

    Showtimes
  • Pre-film seminar by Dr. Shilpa Parnami of Boston University. 

    Showtimes
  • In this five-week class, explore women's voices at the intersection of direction and cinematography.

    Showtimes
  • With her take on Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, Sailor, Claire Denis firmly established herself as a great visual tone poet of our time.

    Showtimes
  • Winner of the Audience Award: U.S. Documentary at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival.

    Showtimes
  • See it before, or after, watching Boorman and the Devil at BUFF! 

    Showtimes
  • 71% of the Earth's surface is covered by water. That's a big place to find one fish.

    Showtimes
  • Peter Jackson brings J.R.R Tolkien's Lord of the Rings from page to screen in this epic, Academy-Award winning trilogy.

    Showtimes
  • The new film from acclaimed director Christian Petzold (Phoenix, Transit). 

    Showtimes