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Payal Kapadia’s sophomore feature film, All We Imagine As Light, tells the story of two nurses living and working in Mumbai. After making waves with her 2021 debut documentary, A Night of Knowing Nothing, Kapadia trades non-fiction for fiction to shine a light on the lives of women navigating modern India’s largest city.
Prabha and Anu could not be more different. Prabha is a dedicated head nurse, taking her responsibilities seriously as she quietly longs for her absent husband. Free-spirited Anu follows her heart, embarking on a secret romance complicated by religion. Through their daily routines at the hospital, we see how each approaches womanhood in contemporary Mumbai.
When their elderly friend Parvati prepares to leave the city, the nurses accompany her on a trip to the seaside village of their youth. Away from the demands of urban life, they find themselves in a place of reflection. New experiences call their perspectives into question and stir buried emotions to the surface.
In exploring women’s reality within family and society, Kapadia paints an intimate portrait of ordinary people carved out against Mumbai’s vast, vibrant backdrop. Through subtle performances and observant filmmaking, All We Imagine As Light sheds light on the inner lives of those often overlooked.
Payal Kapadia’s Gentle Story Follows Three Nurses Through Change
The quiet drama focuses on Prabha, Anu, and Parvati, three women making their way to Mumbai. Prabha works as the head nurse at a local hospital, where she meets the fun-loving but restless Anu. Though they are different in temperament, the two become close friends and roommates. Parvati, an older widow, works alongside them as a cook.
Comfortable yet wanting more, the women find their dissatisfactions surfacing one by one. For Prabha, a package arrives from her husband in Germany—a wedding gift sent after a year of silence. Unsettled, she hides the rice cooker, symbolic of a marriage drifting farther each day. Meanwhile, Anu sneaks around with Shiaz, risking censure from judgmental colleagues.
When Parvati decides to leave Mumbai, escaping developers seizing her home, Prabha and Anu accompany her on an impulsive trip. Traveling to Parvati’s village by the sea, they leave behind the city’s constraints. Away from watchful eyes, Anu and Shiaz’s romance deepens in nature’s calm. For introspective Prabha, caring for a villager opens her heart in a vivid dream.
The film traces their emotional awakenings with empathy. Prabha is mothering others but neglecting herself. Parvati is embracing the community after a loss. Anu’s rebellious spirit is battling social divides. Through a sympathetic lens, Kapadia finds humanity in the struggles and joys of everyday life. Her gentlewomen grasp life’s fragility yet find resilience, coming to see hope where once there was emptiness. A trip granting solace, it seeds renewal within each nurse, ready to bloom.
Mumbai by Moonlight
Payal Kapadia wields the camera like a painter’s brush, bringing the bustling city of Mumbai to life in vivid yet grounded shades. In All We Imagine As Light, stillness and motion mingle as waves upon the shore, capturing everyday scenes in a poetry of light and shadow.
The director immerses us in the ceaseless currents of Mumbai, where faces blend into crowds that spill from trains like slipped beads, reforming endlessly. Through thronging streets, we float, glimpsing characters adrift upon the tide yet tethered by purpose—Prabha’s unflagging care for patients, Parvati’s self-reliance in the face of encroaching towers. Impermanence looms in sterile construction and the threat of eviction, yet steadfast humanity endures.
Kapadia’s lens dwells on lived-in details: a damp sari drying on an open window, pattering rain that seems to wash colors richer rather than blear them. Her close-ups unwrap inner worlds through subtle gestures—the static hold of Prabha clutching a mysterious gift at night, Anu’s rolling laugh transforming grim diagnosis into hopeful play. This care imbues everyday garb and implements with beauty: saris shimmer like rainbow waves, medical tools glint purposefully as swords of mercy.
In the village by the sea, Kapadia’s camera caresses a new rhythm. Sun-kissed seascapes welcome the women’s wanderings like a salve. Through woods wombed in greenery and down sandy lanes, Kapadia guides our eye to focus inward. Here, characters shed masks and bare feelings as the tides sank their sands. Prabha finds solace to surface buried longing, and new light enters where shadow had shut out all but duty.
Through intimate scenes like secret meetings mirrored in monsoon raindrops, Kapadia shows that impermanence need not weaken bonds of care but strengthen their flexibility. Her frames flow as these women’s lives interlink, each finding reflection in the others’ eyes like ripples upon a pool, gathering them in and setting them free.
Mumbai Modernity
Two nurses find their worlds expanding in unexpected ways. Prabha and Anu both call the bustling city of Mumbai home, yet their lives couldn’t be more different. Prabha focuses fully on her job, caring for patients at the hospital with devotion. After years apart from her husband, she keeps her private feelings carefully guarded. Younger Anu embraces life with gusto, secretively dating Shiaz despite boundaries trying to keep them apart.
When their friend Parvati needs support after losing her home, the women venture with her to the seaside village. Away from the city’s constant activity, their hearts begin opening in new ways. Prabha takes time to cherish nature’s beauty, from raindrops sparkling like tears to the ocean’s peaceful rhythm. As walls come down, she gains clarity on her past and insight into her future. For lively Anu, seizing each moment with Shiaz under the night sky feels exhilaratingly free.
Modern Mumbai brings opportunities but also imposes its own rules. Tradition clashes with individual freedom as the characters navigate love and culture. Gentrification makes longtime residents like Parvati feel displaced in their own neighborhood. Subtle pressures try to shape lives, like expectations of marriage and divisions between faiths.
By spending significant moments among rural ties, the nurses better understand where they come from and where they want to go. Though the city remains their bustling backdrop, each finds strength beyond its surface life. Their unlikely yet loyal bond proves the caring spirit triumphs over any force trying to weaken it. Ultimately, Mumbai is what they make of it, and together, their modern meanings of “home” can be wonderfully reimagined.
Mumbai’s Inner Light
Within Kapadia’s gentle drama lies subtle power, seen most clearly in the depth of its lead performances. Kani Kusruti steps into the shoes of Prabha, the head nurse, portraying a woman of reserve and responsibility.
Behind her composed facade lies loneliness and regret. We glimpse resignation in her downcast eyes and private torment in her gaze, fixed on a forgotten rice cooker. Yet Kusruti gifts Prabha empathy that extends to all in her care. She makes us feel the heart beneath the clinical exterior.
As the younger Anu, Divya Prabha brings an infectious spirit but also vulnerability. Hers is a life filled with dreams that family and faith threaten. In longing glances with her lover Shiaz, we witness defiance mixed with tenderness. When fear and doubt take hold, Prabha conveys it all with expressive features. Her anxious imagination plays out across her face.
So skillfully do these actresses inhabit their roles that we trace each character’s inner landscape. Their every glance and gesture reveal hidden depths. Together, they form a complex sisterhood, their bond deepening as personal challenges surface.
Kusruti and Prabha complement each other flawlessly to form the soul of the film. Through their touches of warmth and moments of quiet reflection, they illuminate the inner light that guides Mumbai’s women and shines through this story of lives in an immense city.
City Symphony With Soul
A trilling piano motif accompanies Kapadia’s drive-by shots of Mumbai, lending solemnity to the film with a subtle promise of playfulness to come. The soundtrack comes to beautiful fruition in later scenes, bringing a poignancy to private moments that feel all the more vivid for their stillness.
Editors Clément Pinteaux and Jeanne Sarfati craft the swelling metropolis into a character as much as any actor. Their rhythmic interspersing of crowds and solitudes gives each scene room to breathe while binding the story into a cohesive flow. Mumbai’s lights spreading like stars and commuters rocking together on trains lend punctuation to the women’s lives without disruption.
Whether sampling the scale and chaos of 15 million souls or finding intimacy amid it all, the editorial team grants a visual poetry to everyday struggles. They guide us amid hustling torrents to pockets of respite, where our protagonists relax into self-discovery. In bypassing clamorous surface depictions, this city symphony resonates with empathy for its quiet triumphs and untold shared humanity beneath the din.
Closing Revelations
Payal Kapadia’s debut feature film has much to say about women’s lives in modern India. Through the deeply moving lens of three nurses in Mumbai, she explores challenging issues around identity, tradition, romance, and finding one’s place in a fast-changing world. Yet her story is ultimately life-affirming.
Prabha and Anu’s journey outside the city reveals hard-earned wisdom. Freed from stifling expectations, they discover inner strength and solace in their bond. In rural surroundings, Prabha faces past sadness, emerging empowered. Anu’s love, kept secret in Mumbai, blossoms freely. Their revelations show social constraints as obstacles to happiness and fulfillment.
Kapadia delivers an impactful work of feminism through meticulous realism. Her women feel wholly human in secrets, desires, and resilience. Subtle details portray their world with radical empathy. In selection for Cannes, this debut gains long-deserved global recognition. It proves Indian stories and talents deserve worldwide acclaim when granted a platform.
Thirty years since the last Indian film in competition, All We Imagine As Light sets a marker for the future. Payal Kapadia establishes herself as an incisive new cinematic voice. Her glimpse into resilient lives amid complexity offers hope. It reminds us that shared humanity transcends division, and courage and compassion will always light the way. The film lingers in memory, and its closing scenes are a testament to the power of sympathetic storytelling to touch hearts.
The Review
All We Imagine as Light
Payal Kapadia's All We Imagine As Light offers a gorgeous and poignant glimpse into women's inner lives against the backdrop of modern India. With great empathy and artistic flair, it illuminates social realities while celebrating the human spirits that transcend them. Kusruti and Prabha imbue their characters with authentic, stirring depth. Kapadia establishes herself as a filmmaker of outstanding vision, transporting viewers to a landscape we may never see but cannot forget. Highly recommended for its nuanced feminist perspectives and breathtaking visual storytelling.
PROS
- Evocative and empathetic portrayal of female characters
- Striking cinematography that brings Mumbai vividly to life
- Subtle but effective handling of thought-provoking themes
- Outstanding performances from the lead actresses
- Poignant artistry in illustrating everyday struggles and glimpses of joy
CONS
- Minimal character development beyond the two main roles
- The narrative pace drags slightly during transitional periods.
- Some viewers may find the storyline implicit rather than explicitly feminist.
