BPSC 70th CCE Prelims General Studies · Question 128 of 143

Correct — B, All We Imagine as Light. Payal Kapadia's feature — dialogue in Malayalam, Hindi and Marathi, about two Malayali nurses making a life in Mumbai — won the Grand Prix at the 77th Cannes Film Festival, held 14–25 May 2024. The Grand Prix is the Competition jury's second-highest honour, ranked immediately below the Palme d'Or, which that year went to Sean Baker's Anora; the 2024 Competition jury was presided over by Greta Gerwig. Two firsts sit behind the question. It is the first Indian film ever to take the Grand Prix, and it was the first film from India selected for Cannes' main Competition since Shaji N. Karun's Swaham in 1994 — a gap of thirty years, which is why the win was treated as a landmark rather than one more festival prize. Kapadia is a Film and Television Institute of India, Pune graduate and was not new to the Croisette: her documentary A Night of Knowing Nothing had already won the Golden Eye (L'Œil d'or), the festival's best-documentary prize, in 2021. What makes this a hard question rather than a headline recall is that all four options are genuine Cannes 2024 titles, so a candidate who remembers only 'an Indian did well at Cannes' cannot get there. The Shameless is Konstantin Bojanov's film, for which Anasuya Sengupta won the Un Certain Regard performance prize; Sunflowers Were the First Ones to Know... is an FTII student short that won the La Cinef first prize; and The Man Who Could Not Remain Silent took the Short Film Palme d'Or. Only one of the four was directed by Kapadia, and only one won the Grand Prix.

• (a)The Shameless — A real Cannes 2024 film, but directed by the Bulgarian filmmaker Konstantin Bojanov, not by Payal Kapadia. It won an acting prize, not the Grand Prix: Anasuya Sengupta shared the Un Certain Regard performance award for it with Abou Sangaré for Souleymane's Story — itself a first for an Indian performer, which is exactly why this title sticks in the memory alongside Kapadia's.
• (c)Sunflowers Were the First Ones to Know — Chidananda S. Naik's short film, made at the Film and Television Institute of India, Pune, which won the first prize in La Cinef — the section for film-school work. A genuine Indian win at Cannes 2024, but in the student competition, and by a different director; the Grand Prix belongs to the main Competition.
• (d)The Man Who Could Not Remain Silent — Nebojša Slijepčević's Croatian short, winner of the Short Film Palme d'Or at Cannes 2024. It is neither Indian nor a feature, and the Short Film Palme d'Or is a separate award from the Competition's Grand Prix. The option is on the list precisely because its award also carries a grand-sounding name.

The Cannes Film Festival's main Competition has a fixed hierarchy of prizes, and questions of this kind almost always turn on knowing it rather than on knowing the film. The Palme d'Or is the top award; the Grand Prix is second; the Jury Prize is third; then come Best Director, Best Screenplay and the two acting prizes. Running alongside the Competition are parallel sections with their own juries and their own prizes — Un Certain Regard for newer or more unconventional work, La Cinef for films made at film schools, a separate short-film competition with its own Palme d'Or, and the Golden Eye for documentaries. Because each section hands out prizes with impressive titles, an exam can build a plausible-looking option set out of four different winners of four different awards in the same fortnight, as this question does.

The stem gives you two filters and you need both. 'Grand Prix' fixes the section — the main Competition — and 'by Payal Kapadia' fixes the director. Any candidate who only remembers that India had a good Cannes in 2024 will be stuck, because 2024 was an unusually good year for India there: an Indian feature won the Grand Prix, an Indian actress won an Un Certain Regard performance prize, and an Indian film-school short won La Cinef, all in the same edition. Three of the four options are those other winners. The reliable discriminator is the film itself: All We Imagine as Light is the only feature among the four with an Indian director, and the phrase 'first Indian filmmaker to win the Grand Prix' in the stem points to the Competition, not to a parallel section. If the title is unfamiliar, the fallback is elimination by language and form — a Croatian short and a student short cannot be the Competition entry the stem describes.

• The 77th Cannes Film Festival ran 14–25 May 2024; the Competition jury was presided over by Greta Gerwig, and the Palme d'Or went to Sean Baker's Anora
• Payal Kapadia's All We Imagine as Light won the Grand Prix — Cannes' second-highest Competition honour — the first Indian film ever to do so
• It was the first Indian film in the Cannes main Competition since Shaji N. Karun's Swaham in 1994, a gap of thirty years
• The film's dialogue is in Malayalam, Hindi and Marathi, and it follows two Malayali nurses working in Mumbai
• Kapadia, an FTII Pune graduate, had earlier won the Golden Eye (L'Œil d'or) for best documentary at Cannes 2021 for A Night of Knowing Nothing
• India's other Cannes 2024 honours: Anasuya Sengupta shared the Un Certain Regard performance prize for The Shameless, and Chidananda S. Naik's FTII short Sunflowers Were the First Ones to Know... won the La Cinef first prize

• Treating the Grand Prix as the top Cannes award — it is second; the Palme d'Or is first, and in 2024 it went to Anora
• Attaching the wrong Indian win to the wrong section: Sengupta's prize was in Un Certain Regard and Naik's in La Cinef, not in the Competition
• Assuming an option set drawn from one festival contains only one real film — here all four titles are genuine Cannes 2024 entries

BPSC asks awards as bare recall from the twelve months before the paper — name the film, the person, the country, the theme — and builds the option set out of other real winners from the same event, so partial memory is punished rather than rewarded. UPSC's prelims has largely moved away from award recall; where it touches cinema at all it asks institutional or historical facts, such as who directed a named film or which body certifies films, rather than last year's prize list.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Which film won the Palme d'Or at the 77th Cannes Film Festival in 2024 ?

  • (a)Anora
  • (b)All We Imagine as Light
  • (c)The Substance
  • (d)Emilia Pérez

  Answer(a) Anora — Sean Baker's film took the Palme d'Or; All We Imagine as Light won the Grand Prix, the next award down in the same Competition.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Anasuya Sengupta won the Best Actress award in which section of the Cannes Film Festival 2024 ?

  • (a)Main Competition
  • (b)Un Certain Regard
  • (c)La Cinef
  • (d)Directors' Fortnight

  Answer(b) Un Certain Regard — she shared the section's performance prize for The Shameless with Abou Sangaré, the first Indian to win an acting award at Cannes.