Payal Kapadia’s film ‘All We Imagine As Light’ clinched the Best Film award at the Asian Film Awards 2025. Meanwhile, Shahana Goswami won Best Actress for her role in the Hindi film ‘Santosh’. Both of these are being considered big wins at the 18th Asian Film Awards.
The 18th Asian Film Awards were held on 16 March 2025 at the CQ Centre in the West Kowloon Cultural District, Hong Kong. The nominations were announced on 10 January 2025. The 18th edition featured 30 best films from 25 countries and regions competing in 16 awards.
Filmmaker Payal Kapadia’s critically acclaimed film, All We Imagine As Light, and the Hindi movie Santosh, starring Shahana Goswami and directed by Sandhya Suri, received top honours at the 18th Asian Film Awards 2025. The award ceremony was held at the Xiqu Centre, Hong Kong.
‘All We Imagine As Light’ film had competed with Black Dog from China, Exhuma from South Korea, Teki Cometh from Japan, and Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In from Hong Kong.
Payal Kapadia expressed her joy at being honored in Hong Kong, a place she described as “wonderful for cinema.” She emphasized the importance of celebrating Asian cinema and expressed pride in being part of the community.
All We Imagine As Light is a Malayalam-Hindi movie that follows two nurses, Prabha and Anu, from Kerala as they navigate life and love in Mumbai, along with their friend and cook Parvaty. The film made history as the first Indian title to win the Grand Prix Award at Cannes.
She said, “We have such amazing work coming out of Asia, and we are so proud to be part of that community. And, especially here, because the community is celebrated, and I think that it is really important for us to look at all the cinema from Asia and to be part of that. It was already special to be nominated. And, now it’s so great to win this award.”
On the other hand, for another honor, actor Shahana Goswami was awarded Best Actress for her role in the 2024 crime-thriller Santosh. The film also earned filmmaker Sandhya Suri the Best New Director award. Goswami described the experience of working on Santosh as a pleasant journey, despite initial nerves about her performance.
She shared, “The challenging part was to believe that I could play the part, because I was very nervous about playing the character and feeling like I was acting. And I didn’t want it to seem like I was acting, I wanted it to feel real.” Goswami continued, “You always have this impostor syndrome. Things like this (trophy) help when you realise that ‘Oh maybe you didn’t do such a bad job’. So now I have a little bit more confidence in myself.”
Santosh, streaming on Prime Video, tells the story of a newly widowed housewife who takes upon her late husband’s job as a police constable and gets caught in an investigation of a young girl’s murder. The film is a joint production involving India, the United Kingdom, France, and Germany.
The 18th edition featured a selection of 30 outstanding films from 25 countries and regions, competing across 16 awards. The South Korean film Exhuma with 11 nominations was the most-nominated film this year. Actors Dean Fujioka, Aokbab Chutimon, Austin Lin, Lo Chun-yip, and Masaki Okada were appointed, with Fujioka serving as the ambassador and the others as youth ambassadors.
The awards ceremony took place on March 16, 2025, at the Grand Theatre, with Jason Chan and Sarah Song as hosts. The event was broadcast live at 17:00 HKT on the YouTube channel of the Asian Film Awards Academy and TVB Plus (Channel 82). And, l All We Imagine as Light by Payal Kapadia won the best film award.
Prior to this, certain events were also held on 14 and 15 March leading to award ceremony:
Stealing the Scene: The Best Supporting Actors Conversation
Breaking Boundaries: The Next Wave of Asian Directors
Tu Duu-chih’s Masterclass: Echoes of Light and Sound
Bringing Stories to Life: The Art of Production Design
Scoring the Screen: The Power of Film Music
Pre-Awards gathering of ambassador Dean Fujioka and four youth ambassadors: Aokbab Chutimon, Austin Lin, Lo Chun-yip, and Masaki Okada. Win Metawin, a Thai star, also attended as they met fans at a special event in apm mall.
Special screenings of three films nominated for Best Film and Best Director at the Awards: All We Imagine as Light; Black Dog; and, Exhuma
Jury had Hong Kong’s Sammo Hung as Jury President – Hong Kong actor, martial artist, film producer and director; Italy’s Sabrina Baracetti; United States’ Roger Garcia; Japan’s Ishizaka Kenji; Taiwan’s Jennifer Jao; South Korea’s Nam Dong-chul; and, China’s Janet Wu Yanyan
In western popular imaginations, on the other hand, India is often seen as exotic and over-the-top, or poor and backward. All We Imagine as Light tells a story of two migrant women from the southern Indian state of Kerala, Prabha (Kani Kusruti) and Anu (Divya Prabha) as they struggle to build a life in Mumbai.
What is the Film About?
“All We Imagine as Light” is a quiet drama about fragility, beauty and kinship, and what it takes to keep going in ordinary, difficult times. Set in contemporary Mumbai, it centers on three Hindu women, their everyday lives and the bonds that they share with each other as well as with the larger world.
The film exhibits an Indianness that is distinctive from the one most frequently represented globally. It depicts a nuanced, complex migrant reality that touches on issues of gender, religion, caste, class, language and access. The refreshing portrayal of Mumbai, and largely of India, reveals an aspect of the nation’s cultural identity that has not been explored within the global space.
The film offers the unfamiliar viewer the time needed to adjust to the foreignness of this world. While it remains foreign to the viewer, it is the politics of the everyday — the human yearning for light — that affords the film a humanistic vision, making it cross-culturally accessible.
One of the primary themes in All We Imagine as Light is disrupting the trite romanticism of Mumbai as a city of dreams. Migrants from across India who come to Mumbai to live a better life experience a kind of disillusionment that is rarely, if ever, addressed in Indian popular culture. Instead, it shows Mumbai as what one of the migrant voice-overs in the film calls a “city of illusions.”
The film starts with disembodied migrant voices in different regional languages such as Tamil, Marathi, Gujarati and Bengali, among others. A montage of the city plays on-screen as viewers hear a voiceover of migrant workers expressing their disenchantment and the “otherness” experienced in Mumbai.
Two Indian women in blue outfits sit on a train. One rests her head on the other’s shoulder. A man says how, after living in Mumbai for 23 years, he still can’t call it his home. This feeling of un-homed in Mumbai is experienced through Prabha and Anu, who work as nurses in a hospital and are also roommates.
The idea of being un-homed is most sharply portrayed when Prabha’s colleague and friend, Parvaty, is evicted from her house. As a widow, Parvaty has no paperwork to prove ownership of the shack she has lived in for years.
In another scene, there is a billboard that promises a “new Mumbai” featuring a light-skinned, hence presumably upper-caste, upper-class, heterosexual couple photographed next to a luxury tower.
Parvaty and Prabha helplessly stare at this billboard, eventually hurling stones at it, thus physically resisting everything that the billboard is representative of. As two women navigating life without husbands or any other male counterpart, this scene is significant. It becomes an active distortion of societal expectations and heteronormative ideals.
Kapadia also uses Mumbai as a site to engage with the challenges of interfaith relationships in India. The panned shots of Mumbai’s busy streets show Muslim Shiaz following Hindu Anu through crowded streets until the couple find a space where they are not at risk of being seen together. The expectations and limitations the couple must navigate showcase the societal surveillance over Hindu-Muslim relationships in India.
Mumbai is home to Bollywood cinema, and therefore oftentimes presents Hindi as the chosen language. Kapadia does not conform to these mainstream expectations of language. She instead showcases the politics of speaking different regional languages in Mumbai. Malayalam, which is widely spoken in Kerela, is the film’s foremost language. Prabha, Anu and her boyfriend, Shiaz, speak Malayalam. Kapadia uses language as an effective tool to further convey the feeling of un-homed in Mumbai. x
All We Imagine as Light is an example of a different kind of Indian cinema: one that goes beyond mainstream narratives, and offers viewers an insight into an India they often don’t get to see. The film’s success indicates that there is potential for an alternate cinema that tells a variety of stories, in a way that is attentive to cultural nuances, and still able to serve as a cultural ambassador around the world.
Educationist/Administrator/Editor/Author/Speaker
Commencing teaching in his early twenties, Prof Aggarwal has diverse experience of great tenure in the top institutions not only as an educationist, administrator, editor, author but also promoting youth and its achievements through the nicest possible content framing. A revolutionary to the core, he is also keen to address the society around him for its betterment and growth on positive notes while imbibing the true team spirit the work force along with.
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