Kapadia’s sophomore feature expertly blends realism and poeticism as her filmmaking of sincerity and subtlety brings us into three Indian women’s perspectives and feelings as they contemplate their lives’ paths, which are uncertain yet paradoxically preordained. 

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This would have been a worthier Cannes Palme d’Or winner than Anora (2024) but a Grand Prix win is a fantastic achievement for one of India’s rising arthouse filmmakers. 

Building upon the critical success of A Night of Knowing Nothing (2021), All We Imagine as Light sees Payal Kapadia expertly blending realism and poeticism in a work that also flits between the lightness of touch and weighty emotions. 

Centering on three Indian nurses of varying ages—they could easily be a grandmother, mother and daughter in another universe—Kapadia focuses on their loneliness and helplessness in a city (Mumbai) that feels alien to them. 

The oldest woman is burdened by the lack of legal papers that would allow her to keep her decades-old home; the middle-aged woman is married but her husband has left for Germany for a long time, while the young one who lives with her is blessed with the bliss of burgeoning love but her boyfriend is a Muslim (not great news for her conservative parents with matchmaking plans). 

Kapadia’s filmmaking of sincerity and subtlety brings us into these women’s perspectives and feelings toward life. 

“You might think you know someone, but they can also be strangers.”

As her early montage of men toiling hard as labourers and homeless folks living on the streets suggests, the blood, sweat and tears of the impoverished are distinct from that of the slightly more well-to-do, bringing into play questions of class and gender. 

However, All We Imagine as Light isn’t a political statement on the disenfranchised—it is far from caustic and doesn’t tell us how to think about the various characters’ circumstances; instead, it affords them the quiet physical and mental spaces between reality and imagination to contemplate their lives’ paths, which are uncertain yet paradoxically preordained. 

The trio, who have learnt or are learning to care for patients in a society oblivious to their contributions, find unexpected female camaraderie and solidarity in each other, probably for the first time in their lives.

Kapadia has rendered the invisible visible, just like light when refracted through a prism, and for a moment in time, the burdens disappear, scattered like fireworks in the night sky.   

Grade: A-

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