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Nurse Prabha's routine is disrupted by a mysterious gift, while her roommate Anu struggles to find intimacy in Mumbai.
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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) and 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, her husband from an arranged marriage living 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.
"Awarded at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival (but infamously overlooked for the 2025 Oscars), All We Imagine As Light is the second feature film by Indian director Payal Kapadia (A Night of Knowing Nothing), an intimate and understated drama, yet human and powerful, about feeling time, our connections, love, and loneliness. The story follows two Malay women, nurses and roommates in Bombay. Prabha, the older one, is married to a man she hasn’t seen in a long time, as he lives in Germany. She is judgmental of the younger woman, Anu, who leads a freer life and secretly romances a Muslim man, something frowned upon in their culture. It’s a film of contrasts: the ways of experiencing love through tradition and freedom, and also the alienating urban life versus a life of introspection, connection, and presence. The Light We Imagined is a discreet and intimate drama, but very human, about ordinary people, how they live love in their day-to-day lives, and even about how we experience our time and connections. One of the best films of 2024 and one of the most beautiful of the decade, something that goes beyond any awards it may or may not have received."