SHREWSBURY FILM SOCIETY
| Director | Payal Kapadia |
|---|---|
| Country | India |
| Year | 2024 |
All We Imagine as Light is a quietly luminous achievement, a film that moves with the confidence of a seasoned master even though it marks the fiction feature debut of Payal Kapadia. Set in modern Mumbai, it follows three women whose lives intersect in the corridors, kitchens and cramped rooms of a busy hospital. What begins as a portrait of everyday routines gradually expands into something richer, more mysterious and unexpectedly moving.
Kapadia opens with a montage of street scenes and the voices of migrants who have come to Mumbai in search of work. The city appears as an ever expanding universe, its skyline a constellation of lights, its trains and windows filled with countless private worlds. This documentary inflection is no accident. Kapadia’s earlier work, including the Cannes winning documentary A Night of Knowing Nothing, informs her sensitivity to the textures of urban life. The film’s early passages acknowledge the density and collision of stories before narrowing their focus to three women who work in the same hospital.
Prabha, played by Kani Kusruti, is a senior nurse whose calm exterior conceals a long separation from her husband, now living in Germany. Anu, her younger colleague and roommate, is newly arrived from the south of India and caught up in the exhilaration of a romance she must keep hidden because her boyfriend is Muslim. Parvaty, a cook in the hospital kitchen, faces eviction from her home, which is being demolished to make way for redevelopment. The three women speak different languages, including Malayalam, Hindi and Marathi, and each carries her own small burdens of regret, longing and resilience.
Kapadia observes them with a patient, empathetic eye. The city’s clamour is ever present, its noise pressing in on their private uncertainties. Prabha’s composure is unsettled when she receives an anonymous rice cooker in the post, almost certainly sent by her estranged husband. Anu struggles to find time alone with her boyfriend, even resorting to a disguise for a planned meeting that collapses at the last moment. Parvaty, recently widowed, has no documentation to prove her right to remain in her home. These are ordinary dilemmas, yet Kapadia reveals the emotional weight they carry.
The film’s second half shifts to the coast, where the women accompany Parvaty back to her village. The change in landscape is transformative. The skies open, the air clears, and the film takes on a dreamlike, almost fable like quality. Here, the women drink, laugh, and briefly escape the pressures of the city. One of them finds a moment of sexual freedom. Another experiences a revelation that is both hallucinatory and grounded in her professional calling. Kapadia allows these scenes to drift toward the poetic, echoing the humanist traditions of filmmakers such as Satyajit Ray and Edward Yang, whose influence several critics have noted.
What distinguishes the film is its emotional clarity. Kapadia captures the insecurity of life in a vast city where people are surrounded by millions yet often feel alone. She also captures the tenderness that can emerge when individuals share their vulnerabilities. The performances from Kusruti, Divya Prabha and Chhaya Kadam are unforced and deeply felt, grounding the film’s more lyrical passages in lived experience.
All We Imagine as Light won the Grand Prix at Cannes, a recognition that reflects both its artistry and its quiet ambition. It is a film about women who contain multitudes, about a city that both shelters and overwhelms, and about the possibility of illumination in the most unexpected places. Kapadia’s vision marks her as a filmmaker of significant promise, and this debut fiction feature feels like the beginning of a major career.
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