All We Imagine as Light (2024)

Select a Date

Browning Cinema

New at the Browning
Directed by Payal Kapadia
With Kani Kusruti, Divya Prabha, Chhaya Kadam
Not Rated, 118 minutes, DCP
In Malayalam, Hindi, and Marathi with English subtitles

The light, the lives, and the textures of contemporary, working-class Mumbai are explored and celebrated by writer/director Payal Kapadia, who won the Grand Prize at this year's Cannes Film Festival for her revelatory fiction feature debut. Centering on two roommates who also work together in a city hospital — head nurse Prabha (Kani Kusruti), recent hire Anu (Divya Prabha), plus their coworker, cook Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam) — Kapadia's film alights on moments of connection and heartache, hope and disappointment.

Prabha, whose husband from an arranged marriage lives in faraway Germany, is courted by a doctor at her hospital; Anu carries on a romance with a Muslim man, which she must keep a secret from her strict Hindu family; Parvaty finds herself dealing with a sudden eviction from her apartment. Kapadia captures the bustle of the metropolis and the open-air tranquility of a seaside village with equal radiance, articulated by her superb actresses and by the camera with a lyrical naturalism that occasionally drifts into dreamlike incandescence. All We Imagine as Light is a soulful study of the transformative power of friendship and sisterhood, in all its complexities and richness.

---