Indian filmmaker Payal Kapadia’s new film, All We Imagine as Light, won the prestigious Grand Prix award at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival in May. The film exhibits an Indianness that is distinctive from the one most frequently represented globally.
Within mainstream Hindi cinema, India is often presented as a homogenous Hindu, upper-caste, middle-class Hindi-speaking nation. In western popular imaginations, on the other hand, India is often seen as exotic and over-the-top, or poor and backward.
All We Imagine as Light tells a story of two migrant women from the southern Indian state of Kerala, Prabha (Kani Kusruti) and Anu (Divya Prabha) as they struggle to build a life in Mumbai. The kind of Mumbai shown in the film is one that has almost never been explored in Indian cinema. In the film, we see its characters contend with cultural and social isolation, gender inequalities and the challenges of Hindu-Muslim love in India.
