A knock-out. Beautiful, moving, and rich.
Mumbai based filmmaker Payal Kapadia has won accolades for her short films and documentaries. So the arrival of her first fictional feature is an exciting event in world cinema.
All We Imagine As Light tells the inter-woven stories of a group of people working at a hospital in Mumbai. Nurses Prabha and Anu share a flat. Prabha’s husband went to Germany for work, and she has not heard from him for a year. Anu, from a Hindu family, has fallen in love with a Muslim boy. Meanwhile their friend at the hospital, Parvaty, has developers trying to evict her from the flat she has called home for years.
Kapadia has crafted a screenplay which gives her actors just enough to work with, not falling into the trap of over-writing. As director, she lets the camera do much of the talking, leaving it in the capable hands of cinematographer Ranabir Das. Right from the opening scenes, we are given the sense of movement that makes up life in Mumbai, a city to which many rural Indians are drawn. Mumbai is the city of dreams. What Kapadia does so well is to evoke both the overwhelming nature of the city, and the human microcosms of which it’s comprised. Politics and feminism are gently present, but very much in the personal. As Kapadia herself says “love in India is always political”.
The ensemble cast is at the heart of this film. The fabulous Kani Kusruti is Prabha; Divya Prabha is delightful as Anu; Chhaya Kadam puts in a moving performance as Pavarty; and Hridhu Haroon is great as Anu’s secret boyfriend Shiaz.
This beautiful film is a love-letter to Mumbai, both the city, and its people. But then the second half sees the characters travel to Pavarty’s home village, on the shores of southern India. This is a different rural India to the one so often portrayed. Not exactly a resort-town, it is still imbued with coastal beauty, Kapadia allowing the camera to linger on the ocean with both awe and yearning.
It is easy to see why this magnificent feature was the first Indian film to win the Grand Prix at Cannes.
All We Imagine as Light opens on Boxing Day.
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