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 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.
