All We Imagine as Light

Following her celebrated documentary A Night of Knowing Nothing (TIFF ’21), writer-director Payal Kapadia’s fiction feature debut follows two women at turning points. Moving from urban bustle to seaside idyll, All We Imagine as Light locates dreamlike reverie in emotional shifts and everyday experiences.

Prabha (Kani Kusruti) and Anu (Divya Prabha) are roommates and nurses at a Mumbai hospital. Prabha is married, but her husband went abroad to work many years ago. Now drifting into middle age, she focuses on her job. Anu, by contrast, is young and full of dreams for her future, which she hopes will include the handsome Muslim boy she’s secretly seeing. Prabha initially regards the potentially scandalous affair as an annoyance, but she comes to sympathize with Anu’s passion, perhaps because she, too, feels the tug of frustrated ardour, thanks to the attentions of a poetry-writing doctor.

When Prabha’s friend Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam) is evicted from her home by heartless developers, she decides to return to the coastal village of her youth. Prabha and Anu tag along for a holiday. Far from the city’s perpetual clamour, the women’s feelings and sense of life’s possibilities are given free rein.

Working again with cinematographer Ranabir Das, Kapadia crafts exquisite beauty from images as simple as people wending through a crowded marketplace or women retrieving laundry from a rooftop clothesline. Yet for all the rapturous visuals, nothing in this heartfelt film is more striking than seeing Prabha and Anu forging their connection. Their sisterhood emerges slowly and is all the more moving for its measured pace.

ROBYN CITIZEN