By Firdaus Ali in Toronto
Now, here’s a poetic story of three women. Of conflicts, solidarity and belonging.
All We Imagine as Light is a fictional film, playing with light and time, yet having that wonderful timeless quality about it. It’s a film about the everyday. Of mundane sounds, running trains, incessant rains and human emotions that jump at you through the stillness of time.
Moving from urban bustle to seaside idyll, All We Imagine as Light locates dreamlike reverie in emotional shifts and everyday experiences. Focusing on the things that bring us together, the film moves from urban bustle to seaside idyll.
Set against the backdrop of Mumbai, a city of dreams and contradictions — the film has all the hustle bustle of the mega city, but also takes you to the scenic shores of India’s coastal port-town Ratnagiri, where time stands still against frothy, lapping waves.
With poetry infused in its screenplay, Mumbai montages and the magic of cinematographer Ranabir Das (A Night of Knowing Nothing), make the film truly special. With the film, writer-director Payal Kapadia crafts exquisite beauty from images as simple as people wending through a crowded marketplace or women retrieving laundry from a rooftop clothesline.
This exquisitely beautiful and heartfelt fiction feature debut from Kapadia (A Night of Knowing Nothing) follows two nurses experiencing personal turning points tinged with the possibility of romance.
The film received its Canadian premiere at TIFF2024, while also winning the prestigious Grand Prix at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. Incidentally, the win is a historical first for an Indian film at Cannes and a feather in Kapadia’s cinematic cap.
Kapadia is a Mumbai based filmmaker, who has studied film direction at the prestigious Film & Television Institute of India (FTII), Pune. In 2017, her short film Afternoon Clouds was the only Indian film that was selected for the 70th Cannes Film Festival. This as well as And What Is the Summer Saying premiered respectively at the Cinéfondation and the Berlinale.
She won the Golden Eye award for best documentary film at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival for her film A Night of Knowing Nothing, which was also screened at TIFF 2021.
All We Imagine as Light is a heartfelt fiction feature that follows two nurses experiencing personal turning points tinged with the possibility of romance, winning her the Grand Prix at this year’s Cannes Film Festival
The film begins in Mumbai, when Nurse Prabha’s routine is troubled when she receives an unexpected gift from her estranged husband. Her younger roommate, Anu, also a nurse, tries in vain to find a spot in the city to be intimate with her boyfriend. A trip to a beach town allows them to find a space for their desires to manifest.
The film title shows hope and light and the possibilities that life has to offer. The idea of setting the film in a local city hospital, took shape when Kapadia started to care for an ailing family member. The two nurses Prabha (played with eloquent poise by Kani Kasruti) and the boisterous love-seeking Anu (played with equal elan by Divya Prabha), have contradictory characteristics and unpredictable outcomes.
Actor Chhaya Kadam who plays the role of Parvaty, portrays what it means to be an undocumented migrant worker and to “unbelong” to the city you have lived and worked all your life. Kadam felt that she just had to play the character of Parvaty due to her tryst with Mumbai. She wanted to work with Kapadia to enhance her own cinematic prowess with the film that has received critical acclaim globally.
Parallel journeys and conflicts between multi-generational women add to the complexities and multiple layers of the film. Kapadia calls film a great “learning process” where she and her team constantly improvised the scenes through role play and active discussion.
The story revolves around Prabha and Anu, who are roommates and nurses at a Mumbai hospital. Prabha is married, but her husband went abroad to work many years ago. Now drifting into middle age, she focuses on her job.
Anu, by contrast, is young and full of dreams for her future, which she hopes will include the handsome Muslim boy she’s secretly seeing. Prabha initially regards the potentially scandalous affair as an annoyance, but she comes to sympathize with Anu’s passion, perhaps because she, too, feels the tug of frustrated ardour, thanks to the attentions of a poetry-writing doctor.
When Prabha’s friend Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam) is evicted from her home by heartless developers, she decides to return to Ratnagiri, the coastal village of her youth. Prabha and Anu tag along for a holiday. Far from the city’s perpetual clamour, the women’s feelings and sense of life’s possibilities are given free rein.
Yet for all the rapturous visuals, nothing in this heartfelt film is more striking than seeing Prabha and Anu forging their connection. Their sisterhood emerges slowly and is all the more moving for its measured pace.
Two distinct colour pallets dominate the film. A blue haze when the film was shot in Mumbai. The blue relives Mumbai’s monsoon season when the entire city gets covered by blue tarpaulin protecting the many vulnerable spaces of Mumbai.
The film’s colour pallet shifts from Mumbai’s blue to an earthy red to match the red rocks and landscape of the coastal city of Ratnagiri.
A tastefully made film where everyday reality suddenly looks and feels magically appealing!
