It must feel especially cruel to be lonely in Mumbai. It’s true of every metropolis, every place with a 24/7 clang that we’re told leaves no room for quiet and disconnection. To be lonely there is to be plagued by silence in a storm, and anyone who’s experienced it will find that Payal Kapadia’s fiction debut All We Imagine as Light glows with an all-too-familiar ache. It’s a film that feels like a long exhale, the moment of unburdening after a tight embrace. It’s beautiful.
All We Imagine as Light is a portrait not only of a place, and all the social and political forces that drive it, but of the intensity of feeling it coughs up. Kapadia’s previous work, 2021’s A Night of Knowing Nothing, was a documentary about a real relationship torn apart by the caste system; in All We Imagine as Light, the first Indian film to win the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival, it’s as if a hundred unknown experiences have been distilled into the characters of Prabha (Kani Kusruti) and Anu (Divya Prabha). They’re nurses and roommates, outsiders who’ve arrived in the city because, eventually, it seems as if everyone has to.
