Film review: All We Imagine as Light takes a deeply moving look at women toiling in Mumbai
The fiercely feminist film is shot with dreamlike beauty, often at night, in story of love and longing
Kani Kusruti as the melancholy nurse Prabha in All We Imagine as Light.
All We Imagine as Light is at VIFF Centre on January 1 and 2 as part of the Best of 2024, and from January 4 to 8
A PHOTOGRAPH ON the web of the cast in Payal Kapadia’s poetic All We Imagine as Light—taken when the film won a history-making Grand Prix at Cannes this year—features actor Kani Kusruti flashing a wide, movie-star smile. For anyone who has seen the moving story on India’s migrant women, it’s startling; in the role of central character Prabha, she is unforgettable as a melancholy nurse who can barely contain the ache of loneliness and longing. Enigmatic and lost in thought, she carries the weight of working in sprawling, chaotic Mumbai.
Kapadia finds lyrical ways to establish the rush of the megacity, particularly at night. The opening shots from a train window take us past hordes of market workers unloading their produce for the next day. Again and again, Kapadia captures endless highrises against the night sky or the snarl of traffic from a car window, often under an onslaught of monsoon rain. People come here from villages all over the country to make money, but what do they lose or gain in the process?
Prabha leaves for work in the dark and returns in the dark. We meet her as she takes the train into her shift at the hospital. She shares a cramped apartment with younger, feisty nurse Anu (Divya Prabha). Despite their closeness, they keep their yearnings secret from each other: Prabha longs for the husband who left for Germany soon after their arranged marriage; the Hindu Anu is having a forbidden affair with her Muslim boyfriend Shiaz (Hridhu Haroon). Both devote their lives to caring for people at overcrowded hospitals, but they receive little pay—or respect—in return. As women, they’re hampered by social structures. A kind doctor writes Prabha love poetry, but she recoils in shame when other nurses see them speaking together, because she’s technically married and off limits. As for Anu and the gentle Shiaz, they resort to stealing momentary kisses in parking garages and darkened soccer-field corners. Together they laugh at the “matrimony profiles” her parents send her—but the fate of an arranged marriage lurks as a real threat.
Respite comes in the last third of the film as the pair join an older hospital worker who decides to return to her seaside birth village after toiling for decades in Mumbai. The sounds of waves, birds, and crickets fill the air and the women briefly find a new kind of freedom away from Mumbai (Shiaz has secretly come to the same town). Here they can let go of shame and judgment, and form a found family.
Unexpected jazz piano gives this meditation on injustice and loneliness an artful flourish. Throughout, All We Imagine as Light is shot in a feverishly beautiful way that echoes the dreamlike feel of some of the story. Nurses in sky-blue uniforms rush out to pull down pink and white sheets from a rooftop clothesline, while a seaside shack stakes out its place on a nighttime beach, its multicoloured twinkle lights blinking against the darkness. The director’s camera makes you feel the heat in the air in a sensual way. When men and women dare to touch, she focuses tightly in on their interlocking fingers.
In this fiercely feminist film, Kapadia, like her characters, manages to find the light in the dark—and suggests that love, so often frustratingly forbidden to these women, is that light. 
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