Payal Kapadia, director and screenwriter of All We Imagine As Light, made history in 2024 when her film won the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival, the first Indian film to do so. Made in Mumbai, and in many ways a portrait of Mumbai, this film has impressed critics internationally. While considered an Indian film, it’s a coproduction of India with four European countries.
The film starts out on the streets of Mumbai. We hear several languages spoken there. We see many angles of the crowded streets, the claustrophobic high-rises which blot out the sky, and the busy night markets. So many people…
Not being an expert on the Mumbai movie industry, I didn’t recognize the names on the credits, but they are talented filmmakers. The lead actors are Kani Kusruti, Divya Prabha, Chhaya Kadam and Hridhu Haroon. Often in the film, the actors are shown expressing emotion in close-ups, so they are constantly challenged.
The storyline follows three women who are Malayali nurses in a Mumbai hospital. All the characters are working class folk. Through these lead characters, we get a sense of modern lifestyles and culture there.
More interesting still are the personal stories of each of the three nurses. Prabha is an attractive woman, mature in decision-making. She is married, by arranged marriage, to a man who has left India for Germany where he works in a factory. She hasn’t heard from him in more than a year and she suffers his neglect.
Anu is younger, frivolous, at times a flirt. But she genuinely is in love with Shiaz. The problem is that her religion is Hinduism, and his is Muslim. Their love is a Romeo and Juliet feature of this emotional story.
The third woman, Parvaty, is older. She cannot prove residency in her building, and she has been evicted. A skyscraper is being built on that lot. Parvaty decides to leave the over-crowded streets of Mumbai for a rural village where she has been promised work. Prabha and Anu, good friends that they are, travel there with her to help her settle in.
Payal Kapadia takes that basic story of All We Imagine As Light and transforms it into a tone poem. Mumbai is dark, always raining, shadowy, with too many people speaking many languages. The village is all sunshine. Peace lives there. Love lives there. The nature is welcoming.
Kapadia uses her camera to evoke mood and emotion. She does so with long shots of hundreds of people moving about. She also does so by moving in close on her main characters’ faces to study their grief and longing.
There is a brief sex scene between Anu and Shiaz. I do not remember seeing a sex scene that expresses love the way this one does. This film blends the struggles of urban living in the streets of Mumbai with the beautiful countryside and uses those locations to articulate the very strong personalities of the characters she has created. It’s an amazing movie.
Audrey Kupferberg is a film and video archivist and retired appraiser. She is lecturer emeritus and the former director of Film Studies at the University at Albany and co-authored several entertainment biographies with her late husband and creative partner, Rob Edelman.
The views expressed by commentators are solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of this station or its management.
