Adelaide Film Festival Review: All We Imagine As Light

Tender and beautifully observed Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine as Light is part of a turning point in Indian cinema where the lives of women are given the spotlight. Like Shuchi Talati’s 2024 Girls Will Be Girls, Kapadia’s focus is the unique pressures put upon women and girls to find a space where they can express their emotions and desires unhampered by patriarchal traditions which have kept them locked as secondary players in their own lives.

The film opens in an almost documentary fashion with the most populated city in India bathed in an ‘ever light’ – dawn, dusk, twilight: Mumbai is awake, and people are working, travelling, sleeping on the trains, rustling in the slums… moving. A host of voices explain how they came to be in the city and how they never left. They come to make money to send home to their families in smaller villages. They come to follow their ‘dreams’ (“The dreams are illusions” one voice says). They come to be a part of the wider world. Yet often in doing so they become lost and anonymous. More alone than they could have expected amongst the sea of almost twenty-two million people, so many of whom are the working class who continue to build the metropolis but are human palimpsests – erased and written over.

Prabha (Kani Kusruti), Anu (Divya Prabha) and Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam) work in a Mumbai hospital. Prabha is a conscientious, careful, and senior nurse. Respected by the doctors and trusted by the patients. Anu is a recent addition to the staff and shares an apartment with Prabha. She is bucking against tradition, handing out contraceptives to young mothers who already have too many children and dating a young Muslim man, Shiaz (Hridhu Haroon). Parvaty, a cook at the hospital, has been living in the same apartment for twenty-two years and due to her deceased husband not leaving any paperwork is about to be evicted by unscrupulous property developers as they gentrify the area.

Prabha is being gently and chastely romanced by Dr. Manoj (Azees Nedumangad). Like Prabha he is Malayali and is struggling with Hindi. He is aware Prabha is married but writes her poetry and waits for her after work. Prabha is in limbo because she hasn’t seen her husband in years – they married and soon after he went to Germany. She hasn’t heard from him in a what she guesses must be at least a year. Her husband is a man she barely knows if she ever did know him. Prabha entered an arranged marriage, something Anu cannot bear to consider (yet her parents are pushing her to marry grooms of their choosing), and worse than being fundamentally incompatible with her husband, she is wedded to an insoluble mystery.  

When a German made rice cooker arrives with no accompanying note at her modest apartment, Prabha must work out the meaning. Is it an attempt at connection by her husband, or is it a careless parting gift? Meanwhile the other nurses are gossiping about Anu and her boyfriend. Prabha doesn’t pry. The blossoming romance between Anu and Shiaz is being stifled not only by the social taboo of a Hindu being involved with a Muslim but by the crowded city itself. There is no space for them to be intimate, no space for them to explore what being a couple could mean for them.

Such small sorrows are gradually unveiled. There must be millions of similar stories being whispered in the blue-hued city shot with an exquisite impressionistic eye by Ranabir Das. The weight of tradition bearing down upon the inhabitants of a city which is modernising itself on the surface but maintains class, religious, and gender divisions that are multigenerational.

Payal Kapadia invests time in each generation of women, showcasing the vagaries around them in which the momentum of change is also the entropy of stasis. The city is all encompassing, inexorable, but it erases the people who inhabit it. Pravaty loses her battle against the developers and without compensation to move elsewhere within Mumbai; her life there, and the life of her cotton mill worker husband, doesn’t even become a footnote in the city’s history. When she asks Prabha and Anu to help her to return to her costal hometown the two women agree as they are finding their own relationship with Mumbai increasingly alienating.

The colour palette of the film changes and sunlight finally touches the faces of the women. The light is natural, warm, and caressing. Outside of Mumbai is where each woman reconnects to their authentic selves given space to breathe and evaluate what the future will bring for them. Whether it be permanent or temporary respite the ocean and the caves around the small village offer vistas of possibility. A chance to speak aloud the doubts that have been encircling them. All the tiny wounds which have become cumulative heartbreak begin to heal. Lovers unite in blissful and almost holy intimacy. A stranger washed ashore offers Prabha a moment of closure and catharsis.

Payal Kapadia’s film speaks with millions of whispers. The friendship between the three women is not always in harmony – Anu’s youth and impetuousness cause friction with Prabha. Pravaty’s stubbornness and bossiness does the same. Prabha’s conscientiousness and silence is often mistaken for judgement or disinterest. Yet, each of the women’s hearts unfurl in a sisterhood of earned trust and shapes a shared language.

All We Imagine as Light is sublime – a poem of desire flowing and echoing through Mumbai and modern India. A light projected not only on a screen but also a light to guide South Asian filmmakers away from maximalist spectacle and into the recesses of the reflective rhythms of everyday lives. Payal Kapadia’s cinematic language is specific and universal, articulating a hopeful future of understanding.

Director: Payal Kapadia

Cast: Kani Kusruti, Divya Prabha, Chhaya Kadam

Writer: Payal Kapadia

Producers: Julien Graff, Thomas Hakim

Music: Dhritiman Das Topshe

Cinematography: Ranabir Das

Editor: Clément Pinteaux

Nadine Whitney

Nadine Whitney holds qualifications in cinema, literature, cultural studies, education and design. When not writing about film, art or books, she can be found napping and missing her cat.

Liked it? Take a second to support The Curb on Patreon
Become a patron at Patreon!