Event
All We Imagine As Light
“There are a million stories in the naked city, and Kapadia is about to show you three of them in the most delicate, moving way possible. She’s also about to mount a quiet, sneak attack on your soul.” – Rolling Stone
“It’s shockingly beautiful. “All We Imagine as Light” is a drama about life’s fragility, but it’s also about nurturance.” – NYT
“It is both dreamlike and like waking up from a dream. This is a glorious film.” – Guardian
100% on Rotten Tomatoes
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; 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 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.
