All We Imagine as Light

Grand Prix, 2024 Cannes Film Festival

Amidst the noise and entropy of life in Mumbai, the dynamic between two roommates unfolds. Prabha is a well-respected nurse whose romantic life is thrown into a state of flux when her overseas husband sends her a surprising gift and a handsome doctor makes his interest known. Anu, Prabha’s younger, more free-spirited counterpart, must hide her relationship with a Muslim boy from her Hindu family, and sneaks around to find the chance to finally sleep with him. When Prabha and Anu accompany their coworker who has been displaced by urban development into her coastal hometown, the trip becomes an escape and chance to rediscover the commitments they have to each other and to themselves.

Feminist thinking has long held that the everyday is a site of politics. With ALL WE IMAGINE AS LIGHT, director Payal Kapadia set out to make a film about “women leaving their homes to work somewhere else” and the day-to-day events that fill the in-between. In the follow up to her shattering and poetic docufiction A Night of Knowing Nothing (SDAFF ‘21), Kapadia makes poetry of the rhythms of urban movement – the sound of a passing train, the collection of bodies in a crowded marketplace – and the desire and friendships that color women’s lives.

– Justin Nguyen