Directed by Payal Kapadia (India, France, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and Italy, 2024, 118 min.). Hindi, Malayalam, and Marathi with subtitles. 

Writer-director Payal Kapadia, who won the Grand Prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, celebrates the lives, textures, and light of working-class Mumbai in her stunning fiction feature debut. The story centers on two roommates and colleagues at a city hospital—head nurse Prabha and newcomer Anu—along with their coworker, the hospital cook, Parvaty. Kapadia’s film captures moments of connection and heartache, hope and disappointment with striking intimacy: stuck in a long-distance arranged marriage with her husband in Germany, Prabha finds herself drawn to a doctor at the hospital; Anu must hide her romance with a Muslim man from her conservative Hindu family; and Parvaty struggles with a sudden eviction from her home.  

Kapadia vividly portrays the bustling energy of Mumbai and the serene beauty of a seaside village, blending lyrical naturalism with dreamlike flourishes. Anchored by superb performances, All We Imagine as Light is a deeply soulful exploration of the transformative power of friendship and sisterhood, rendered in all their complexity and richness. 

“A quiet drama about fragility, beauty and kinship.…Flat-out wonderful, one of finest of the year.” —New York Times