The light, the lives, and the textures of contemporary working-class Mumbai are explored and celebrated by writer/director 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. Prabha, her husband from an arranged marriage living in faraway Germany, is courted by a doctor at her hospital; Anu carries on a romance with a Muslim man, which she must keep a secret from her strict Hindu family; and Parvaty finds herself dealing with a sudden eviction from her apartment. Kapadia captures the bustle of the metropolis and the open-air tranquility of a seaside village with equal radiance — articulated by her superb actresses and by the camera with a lyrical naturalism that occasionally drifts into dreamlike incandescence. ALL WE IMAGINE AS LIGHT is a soulful study of the transformative power of friendship and sisterhood, in all its complexities and richness.
“There is a freshness and emotional clarity in Payal Kapadia’s Cannes competition selection, an enriching humanity and gentleness which coexist with fervent, languorous eroticism and finally something epiphanic in the later scenes and mysterious final moments…. This is a glorious film.” —Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian
“Just two features into her young career, [director Payal] Kapadia has established her rare talent for finding passages of exquisite poetry within the banal blank verse of everyday Indian life.” —Jessica Kiang, Variety
“The beats of ALL WE IMAGINE AS LIGHT are calibrated with hypnotic grace creating a rhythm that induces pure pleasure. No mystery of the human heart will reveal itself until the scene that naturalistically brings it to the surface.” —Sophie Monks Kaufman, IndieWire