NZIFF: All We Imagine As Light

Direct from Competition in Cannes where it scored the Grand Prix, this radiant Indian drama follows two nurses looking for love but finding sisterhood in the vibrant, heaving 20 million plus populace of Mumbai.

The conversation on the female gaze in cinema finds apt material for a case study in Payal Kapadia’s richly textured and magnificently subdued All We Imagine as Light. After winning the Best Documentary at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival with A Night of Knowing Nothing (NZIFF 2021), a work that inventively combined the personal and the political, Kapadia was the first Indian filmmaker invited to the Cannes Competition in exactly 30 years. And with All We Imagine as Light she came ever so close to winning the 2024 Palme d’Or, nabbing the runner up award, the Grand Prix.

Kapadia’s narrative debut is a delicate ode to female bonding set against the backdrop of the sprawling metropolis of Mumbai, which plays as a pulsating, vivid part in the story. The protagonists of All We Imagine as Light are two Keralan nurses sharing an apartment: the compassionate Prabha, whose absent husband is working in Germany, and the younger Anu, who has a secret relationship with a young Muslim man. Finding a place in the big city is a key aspect of Kapadia’s narrative: Anu struggles for privacy to hide her affair, while Prabha’s friend Parvati is evicted from her house. When Parvati moves back to her coastal village, Prabha and Anu pay her visit, finding a communal shelter from their daily worries.

Filmed with exquisite elegance and precision, All We Imagine as Light surprises for its subtly unconventional and even subversive approach to visual storytelling and confirms Kapadia as one of the most singular and compelling voices of contemporary cinema. — Paolo Bertolin

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