Dating in India can often be fraught. There’s a caste system to contend with, broader religious segregation, the watchful eyes of your community and, of course, your family’s wishes, whether it’s an arranged marriage they want for you, or simply heterosexuality. In Payal Kapadia’s debut fiction feature – the first Indian film to play in Cannes’ official competition since 1994 – the former is plaguing Anu (Divya Prabha), a young Mumbaikar who works as a nurse at a local hospital. Anu spends her days behind a reception desk, encouraging visitors to have their husbands get vasectomies, texting Shiaz, a boy her parents haven’t picked out for her, and playing dreamily with various items in the office: taking a stethoscope to listen to the medical models and other items in her immediate vicinity, as well as her own heart.

In these languid, playful scenes, Kapadia sets up Anu as a headstrong romantic, a foil for her roommate Prabha (Kani Kusruti) – the head nurse at the hospital and the straight man to Anu’s eccentric dreamer. Unlike Anu, Prabha is married, and a little severe. She’s absorbed greater cultural dogma than her younger, more rebellious friend, and her elevated standing in their workplace means she feels more responsibility – and is under more external pressure – to uphold these values. “If you behave like a slut, people won’t respect you,” she tells Anu bluntly after rumours about her secret boyfriend begin to echo around the hospital.

Kapadia’s story reads as timeless for many reasons: this blurring of well-intentioned, cross-generational advice with a kind of emotional abuse, the plight of two young star-crossed lovers; and the glowing celluloid feel of each frame. Contemporary motifs are sparse, but references to actors like Amitabh Bachchan, brands like Reishunger, and the sight of smartphones situate the film in a recognisable present. The filmmaker’s renderings of desi girlhood are subtle but powerful, coming through in small details: the claw clips and medicine strips strewn about the apartment, tiny tattoos and even tinier, heart-shaped lingerie hardware, stolen moments under cover of darkness.

Like Kapadia’s feature debut – an intimate yet politically-charged documentary titled A Night Of Knowing Nothing – her latest is set during the monsoon season, a choice that bathes each scene of the film’s first act in an all-encompassing blue, and positions All We Imagine As Light as a successor in a longstanding canon of Bollywood romances. But this is no masala movie. That it is Shiaz’s Muslim faith that poses a wedge between him and Anu feels hyper-relevant at a time when the country’s Hindu nationalist prime minister is attempting to secure a third consecutive term by continually stoking Islamophobic sentiment. The film also approaches an anti-capitalist critique in its survey of Mumbai’s urban sprawl, speaking disparagingly of the seemingly endless construction of new tower blocks, and even going as far as having Prabha throw rocks at a luxury development in Lower Parel.

As an NRI (non-resident Indian), it is heartening to see these issues given cinematic airtime, not to mention the much-deserved arthouse treatment of Mumbai’s crowded shopfronts and neon Sanskrit signs. The last time I visited my family there, we went to see Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge – a musical romance epic that has screened daily at the Maratha Mandir theatre ever since its 1995 release and, as I was reliably informed, a makeout movie that provides ideal cover for sneaky young lovers. Peer onto the roadside at night and you’ll be able to see any number of kissing couples grabbing each other just as Anu and Shiaz do. In this way, Kapadia’s film precisely captures the realism of the particular romantic chaos native to Mumbai: a warm, heady place where desire, tradition, shame, and pride are in constant negotiation with one another.

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Dating in India can often be fraught. There’s a caste system to contend with, broader religious segregation, the watchful eyes of your community and, of course, your family’s wishes, whether it’s an arranged marriage they want for you, or simply heterosexuality. In Payal Kapadia’s debut fiction feature – the first Indian film to play in Cannes’ official competition since 1994 – the former is plaguing Anu (Divya Prabha), a young Mumbaikar who works as a nurse at a local hospital. Anu spends her days behind a reception desk, encouraging visitors to have their husbands get vasectomies, texting Shiaz, a boy her parents haven’t picked out for her, and playing dreamily with various items in the office: taking a stethoscope to listen to the medical models and other items in her immediate vicinity, as well as her own heart.

In these languid, playful scenes, Kapadia sets up Anu as a headstrong romantic, a foil for her roommate Prabha (Kani Kusruti) – the head nurse at the hospital and the straight man to Anu’s eccentric dreamer. Unlike Anu, Prabha is married, and a little severe. She’s absorbed greater cultural dogma than her younger, more rebellious friend, and her elevated standing in their workplace means she feels more responsibility – and is under more external pressure – to uphold these values. “If you behave like a slut, people won’t respect you,” she tells Anu bluntly after rumours about her secret boyfriend begin to echo around the hospital.

Kapadia’s story reads as timeless for many reasons: this blurring of well-intentioned, cross-generational advice with a kind of emotional abuse, the plight of two young star-crossed lovers; and the glowing celluloid feel of each frame. Contemporary motifs are sparse, but references to actors like Amitabh Bachchan, brands like Reishunger, and the sight of smartphones situate the film in a recognisable present. The filmmaker’s renderings of desi girlhood are subtle but powerful, coming through in small details: the claw clips and medicine strips strewn about the apartment, tiny tattoos and even tinier, heart-shaped lingerie hardware, stolen moments under cover of darkness.

Like Kapadia’s feature debut – an intimate yet politically-charged documentary titled A Night Of Knowing Nothing – her latest is set during the monsoon season, a choice that bathes each scene of the film’s first act in an all-encompassing blue, and positions All We Imagine As Light as a successor in a longstanding canon of Bollywood romances. But this is no masala movie. That it is Shiaz’s Muslim faith that poses a wedge between him and Anu feels hyper-relevant at a time when the country’s Hindu nationalist prime minister is attempting to secure a third consecutive term by continually stoking Islamophobic sentiment. The film also approaches an anti-capitalist critique in its survey of Mumbai’s urban sprawl, speaking disparagingly of the seemingly endless construction of new tower blocks, and even going as far as having Prabha throw rocks at a luxury development in Lower Parel.

As an NRI (non-resident Indian), it is heartening to see these issues given cinematic airtime, not to mention the much-deserved arthouse treatment of Mumbai’s crowded shopfronts and neon Sanskrit signs. The last time I visited my family there, we went to see Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge – a musical romance epic that has screened daily at the Maratha Mandir theatre ever since its 1995 release and, as I was reliably informed, a makeout movie that provides ideal cover for sneaky young lovers. Peer onto the roadside at night and you’ll be able to see any number of kissing couples grabbing each other just as Anu and Shiaz do. In this way, Kapadia’s film precisely captures the realism of the particular romantic chaos native to Mumbai: a warm, heady place where desire, tradition, shame, and pride are in constant negotiation with one another.

On the bus to the casino, Sasie Sealy had a vision. “I don’t know if you’ve been on one in New York, or if they have them here [in London], but there are all these buses from Chinatown that basically take all the old people to gamble,” she explains, “They’re super cheap, and they advertise in all the Chinese newspapers.”

In the vehicle, surrounded by “a bunch of old grandmas and grandpas,” Sealy imagined the catalytic moment of her debut feature film: a duffel bag of money falling into the hands of someone it had never belonged to.

From this one scene, Lucky Grandma was born. The film is a Coen brothers-influenced comedy centered on the surly Grandma Wong (Tsai Chin), a chain-smoking Chinese widow living alone in New York City. Grandma becomes embroiled in a Chinatown gang war when, on her way back from a bad day at the casino, she happens upon a large bag of cash and takes it for herself with little hesitation.

When the notorious Red Dragon gang comes calling for their money, Grandma hires Big Pong (Corey Ha), a sweet-natured bodyguard from a rival gang to protect her. The story follows the unlikely pair through a series of capers through the city’s hair salons, mahjong parlours, and leisure centres, until Grandma is forced to face up to her theft.

Together with her collaborator Angela Cheng, Sealy wrote the script for Lucky Grandma in 2013. The text was inspired by soap operas, spoof movies about Hong Kong gangsters, and Agnès Varda, and is rooted in research on triads operating in Manhattan in the 1990s. For Sealy, the film’s setting is particularly important: “I feel like Chinatown is this almost imaginary place in film history; we wanted something that felt authentic, but still a little mythic.”

Sealy was inspired in particular by ‘Sister Ping’, a female snakehead who built an empire worth $40 million by smuggling immigrants into the country. “I was just taken with the idea of a woman running one of these gangs,” she says, “and this idea that she would have a kinship with Grandma in a way because she’d also be looking for respect, and making her own way.”

When the duo went about trying to secure funding for the venture, they ran into problems. “Nobody wanted to fund a movie about an old woman that was mostly in Chinese!” Sealy says, laughing. “No matter how funny it was. People would love the script, but they just didn’t know what to do with it.”

For a number of years, the project went into hiatus and Sealy began writing for TV. Then, in 2018, Cheng and Sealy put the script forward for AT&T and the Tribeca Film Festival’s ‘Untold Stories’ programme and won a million dollar grant to make the film. “It was a miracle. Very lucky.” Sealy winks.

Bringing aboard legendary actress Tsai Chin as the film’s lead was another such blessing. “A good friend of mine had gone to the 25th anniversary screening of Joy Luck Club last year, and Tsai was at the Q&A,” Sealy recalls. “My friend called me up immediately afterwards and said, ‘She seems pretty feisty to me, even though she’s old. I think you should talk to her.’”

Aware of the stigma the age of her central character had attracted when pitching around the script, Sealy was wary of casting too old. Indeed, early reviews have called the decision to even have written the 82-year-old lead part, “a risk unto itself.”

“Wait, who said that?” Sealy exclaims, her expression comically quizzical. She continues good-naturedly: “It was a risk. It was a total risk! Originally we were going to cast a 60-something-year-old because it was kind of crazy to make a movie with [anyone older], but I just wasn’t finding Grandma.”

But with Chin, the connection was instantaneous. “As soon as I met her I kind of just knew,” shrugs Sealy. “We had this epic four-hour dinner, where she seduced me, or I seduced her – one or the other – into doing this movie.”

Sealy always had a clear idea of who Grandma should be as a character. “When I roped Angela into writing it with me, we just knew all of these women in our lives that sort of became the same woman, in a way.

“There’s definitely parts of my mom in [Grandma],” Sealy continues. “Angela’s grandmother is in there for sure; a little bit of my grandma, but mostly the fact she was a smoker. There’s a stereotype of these quiet, subservient Asian women. I don’t know where this comes from,” she says, incredulously. “They are definitely not in my family.”

Lucky Grandma screens at the 63rd BFI London Film Festival on Thursday 10 October at 9pm, and again on Sunday 13 October at 6pm.

Despite having almost two thousand followers to her own name, Liza Mandelup doesn’t follow a single person on Instagram. It was a tricky decision to make, particularly as someone who came up as a filmmaker online and cherishes the communities and the space for her work that she found there. “I’ve pulled back a lot since I started to think about who is in control of my emotions,” explains Mandelup. “I want to be in control of my emotions.”

She continues, “We’re at a time where people consume without thinking about that too much, and they don’t understand how a good day can shift from a bad day just because of something they saw on social media. We consume like it’s good for us, and it’s not necessary.”

This complicated truth is the centre of Jawline, a feature-length look at the emotional economy of the internet. Mandelup began shooting the project at the end of 2015, when she started researching fan meet-and-greets. Eventually, she came across her star: Austyn Tester, a 16-year-old nano-influencer from rural Tennessee. In a parallel narrative strand, now-infamous talent manager Michael Weist provides a counterpoint to Tester’s wide-eyed innocence. We see the 19-year-old snapping at his clients in the minimalist Los Angeles mansion in which they all live together, pleading with the younger teens to film their sponsored content on time.

As Tester gains traction online, Mandelup helps us navigate his specific slice of the social mediascape, populated almost entirely by Gen Z teens. This is the Instagram-adjacent land of live broadcasting, where the distance between fan and creator has never been slimmer.

Teen fangirls clamour after the boy broadcasters in convention centres, shopping malls, and through video portals on YouNow with the fervour of Beatlemania. Through a series of interviews, the why of their admiration becomes clear – the platform, and a lack of age difference, has allowed for an artificial intimacy to form between viewer and performer. For one fan, these boys are “the friends I never had, and wish I had”. Another notes how the medium lets you “feel like you have a family”. A third explains how she had to handle life alone when her parents began experimenting with narcotics, but that she’s glad that her younger sister was fortunate enough to have broadcasts to turn to when the situation began to affect her life.

Mandelup originally planned to feature only one fangirl in her film, but changed her mind when she realised their viewpoint was better represented in an ensemble. “I always felt like a lot of his fangirls were trying to escape something in their life. They just wanted something that would take them out of the day-to-day struggle, and give them this alternate version of their present, something that made them feel hopeful.”

Depicting the precedence of screens in the lives of these girls was one of Mandelup’s biggest challenges. “For me, the answer to that was: the internet and social media represents a fantasy. So I was thinking about ways to elevate people’s relationships to social media as people’s relationships to their hopes and dreams, and that lends itself to a lot of imagery. Everything was about creating this dreamscape.”

What we see of the broadcasts themselves is a relentless slew of positive aphorisms. The boys pepper the girls with compliments and questions about their day, assuming a role that is part-therapist, part-boyfriend. It may raise alarm bells, but Mandelup is hesitant to give the situation a moral valence. “People try to ask me if it’s good or bad for them to be following these live broadcasters, and it’s not really that easy to answer. If someone can give you a sense of community and purpose when you don’t have that otherwise, that is not a negative. On the flipside, you can go too deep into that side of yourself, and lose touch with what your actual life is.”

Certainly, the tendency to over-focus on fangirls’ vulnerability denies them a degree of agency. “I think you have to give some credit to these girls. They know what is cool and what is not. They ultimately are the ones who decide who sticks around.”

Jawline is available to watch via Hulu and in select US cinemas from 23 August.