All We Imagine as Light: Payal Kapadia’s graceful vision of Mumbai marks her out as a filmmaker of significant promise

• Reviewed from the 2024 Cannes Film Festival. 

How fitting that Payal Kapadia, who was awarded the Grand Prix at Cannes 2024, has been so fêted in the country that gave us the Lumières: light, after all, is one of her preoccupations. Her first feature, A Night of Knowing Nothing (2021), used the absence of light to incubate and express personal and political passions, captured largely under cover of darkness in documentary style on university campuses in Pune, western India. And towards the end of her latest, similarly nocturnal film, All We Imagine as Light, she makes a stunning case for the transformative power of the light of film itself – how the projector can make absences appear flesh again; can restore, in some painfully unsatisfactory way, those we believed to be missing. 

From the outset, Kapadia establishes yearning – for love, but also for an end to precarious living conditions – as her key theme. The film begins with documentary-style footage of Mumbai accompanied by voiceovers reading out letters written by transplants to this ‘city of dreams’. The feelings of displacement being voiced are not attached to any specific authors – perhaps suggesting that loneliness in urban India is a widespread affliction – but Kapadia soon begins to focus her drama through three key characters, all nurses who have moved to Mumbai from elsewhere. 

Prabha (Kani Kusruti) is a serious, conscientious woman who has recently entered an arranged marriage, only for her husband to leave almost immediately to find work in Germany. He has, over the last year, made no effort to contact her. By contrast, flighty young Anu (Divya Prabha) is frequently in touch with her partner, Shiaz (Hridhu Haroon), their playful text messages appearing on the screen in vibrant yellow. He lives nearby, but is Muslim, which makes their relationship awkward if not impossible in modern India, though Kapadia treats this as a simple fact of life and – unlike in A Night of Knowing Nothing, in which islamophobia is seen in a context of unrest and activism – betrays no political indignation on the matter. Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam), a headstrong widow, is the eldest of the three; shanty-town clearances mean that due to her lack of paperwork her home will be demolished, leaving her with no place to go. 

There are pointed scenes here, such as when the two older women fling rocks at a hoarding for the luxury apartments that will replace Parvaty’s home (“Class is a privilege reserved for the privileged”, it reads). But this is by no means an ‘issue film’, instead finding potency in smaller moments. When Prabha receives a new rice cooker from a nameless sender in Germany, presumed to be her husband, the complex feelings that surface – pleasure, befuddlement, resentment and of course, yearning – are played by Kusruti with the kind of restraint, no less expressive for its quietude, that recalls Satyajit Ray at his best. 

In the third act, the film abandons its metropolitan perspective for rural mysticism. Soon after the three friends take a trip to Parvaty’s birth village on the coast, Prabha saves the life of a nearly drowned fisherman (Anand Sami) by performing CPR. As she tends to him alone, he suddenly becomes a vessel for a voice she has been longing to hear. It’s a devastating, hallucinatory moment that transports the movie away from realism while reminding us that even the film’s more grounded, everyday scenes have had the slippery nature of a dream, or a memory. 

The surreal shift recalls the transcendentalist tendencies embraced, to varying degrees, by other Asian filmmakers such as Apichatpong Weerasethakul or Lav Diaz. These directors are also prone to exploring and magnifying the disjuncture between sound and image, something Kapadia plays with in those opening scenes. But All We Imagine as Light has a different feel, and not simply by dint of being set in India. For one thing, it is unabashedly art-directed, as seen in the melancholic shades of blue that flood the film’s first half – in the nurses’ scrubs, the city lights and some large reams of fabric glimpsed around the city’s infrastructure. For another, the situations Kapadia creates for her characters in Mumbai are highly precise, tangible, material, urgent. It is from very real circumstances, such as looming slum-clearances or economic migration, that the film’s more unreal nature is teased out. 

The cine-literate Kapadia may echo certain Asian filmmakers, but many of her reference points feel distinctly European. The opening section, which includes shots from inside a moving train while those letters are read on the voiceover, immediately recalls Chantal Akerman’s News from Home (1977). Much has been made of All We Imagine as Light being the first Indian film in 30 years to compete at Cannes, but from the Wong Karwai-esque attention to colour to the way the movie recalls the work of festival darlings both contemporary and from decades past, it’s clear this is the work of a filmmaker attuned to international filmmaking practice. Kapadia has, at least until now, been a persona non grata in the Indian production system and has had to look to Europe for financing and development assistance; All We Imagine as Light is a co-production between France, India, the Netherlands and Luxembourg, and much of the crew is French. In this light, it may be unsurprising that her film feels formally and aesthetically like a contemporary international product, rather than something autochthonously Indian. 

This is not a criticism: it is refreshing to see an Indian filmmaker on the world stage explore different approaches and formal techniques so assuredly. With exquisite delicacy, Kapadia has crafted a portrait of Mumbai and its citizens that is by turns precise and impressionistic, run through with poetic realism and careful observation. That it is so different to her previous film, whose largely monochrome docufiction has given way to a more creative approach to capturing equally painful truths, marks her out as a filmmaker of significant promise.