Payal Kapadia’s remarkable feature debut charts the daily lives of three women in Mumbai in a beautifully shot ode to the city and to the power of human connections
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“Evening is my favourite time of the day,” says a character in All We Imagine As Light, as twilight descends on Mumbai – it’s when the city comes alive. In the film-maker Payal Kapadia’s feature debut, which won the Grand Prix at Cannes, night-time in the city is shown in loving detail, as we see markets, fluorescently lit shops and trains full of women returning from work. Vermeer is famously said to have “painted with light”. The same principle seems to animate every frame of Kapadia’s film, as light delicately bounces around the screen, indicating the film’s interest in illuminating moments of hope as untold secrets lie in the shadows. On two occasions, a phone torch cuts through the dark to reveal words – in a notebook, on a cave wall – professing great love that feels otherwise impossible to say.
The film follows Prabha, Anu and Parvaty, who work as nurses and cooks at a hospital. The sensible Prabha (Kani Kusruti) is being courted by a doctor. She likes him, but she’s married. Though she is estranged from her husband, Prabha feels pressured to remain a loyal wife. Her roommate, the free-spirited Anu (Divya Prabha), is secretly seeing a Muslim man, and their love affair is as tender as it is aware of the politics undermining their match. Would her father approve, he asks, “if I used a Hindi name”? The two women are also helping Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam), who is being evicted from her home by developers. A banner across her building shows a city on the march to gentrification: “Class,” it announces, “is a privilege reserved for the privileged!”
All three stories are concerned with the ways in which politics shapes individual lives, which is a longstanding interest of Kapadia’s – her first film, A Night of Knowing Nothing, is a documentary exploring the 2015 student protests against Narendra Modi’s appointment of political sympathiser as a university chair (Kapadia was also a leading figure in the protests). In All We Imagine As Light, each woman’s personal circumstances are depicted with humanity and subtlety, and the film also gives a sense that they’re not alone. One night, Prabha talks to Anu about her failed marriage. As she talks wistfully of the past, the camera surveys the tower blocks of Mumbai, with some apartments still dotted with light. Listening to Prabha’s monologue against this wide open vista, one begins to wonder: how many other women are out there with the same thwarted desires, the same pain? At a time when political forces all across the world are performing acts of closure – narrowing our understanding of who we can call neighbours, fellow citizens, lovers – All We Imagine As Light looks out into the world with roving empathy and curiosity, finding in it moments of intimacy and connection, and plenty to love.
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