All We Imagine Is Light Review

Cities can leave us in contrasting spaces, we are the collective who use their waking hours to service it, and that service is compensated with enough currency to live in that city. We come to cities for opportunities for success and sociality but only find ourselves trapped by capital and the town’s individual culture. Can we strive for more or is this all we’re destined to do? Is our happiness worth giving to something that won’t even effectively house us?

In All We Imagine As Light, we follow 2 women working in a Mumbai hospital. Prabha (Kani Kusruti), the focused and respected head nurse, who is grieving the absence of her husband whom she barely got to know in an arranged marriage before he moved to for work, he hasn’t communicated with her in almost a year. Anu (Divya Prabha), a younger nurse and also Prabha’s roommate, finds city love with a Muslim man Shiaz (Hridu Haroon) which causes gossip and tension in the workplace as well as some scorn from Prabha in a generational divide. The cultural marriage hasn’t worked for Prabha, why is she so judgemental of Anu? And in filmic fashion, how will these two women confront their fears?

The film opens with wide shots of Mumbai and the city crowds on the street, public transport, etc. as dialogue from various sources is overlayed about why these men and women stay in this city. Before we even meet Prabha and Anu, they are not individuals, they are part of a whole socially and economically. This is seen as the plot slowly picks itself apart with Anu exploring her relationship with Shiaz, the joy she feels being around him but also the fear she has about telling her parents about possibly marrying a man like him. Prabha finds a new man, Dr. Manoj (Azeez Nedumangrad) that she’s perhaps interested in but she’s still marred by the shame and guilt of the situation with her husband but also the limits of her culture, what does she look like entertaining another man while she’s still technically married to another?

The strength in Payal Kapadia’s film is the sensitivity and time she takes with her characters and the setting, we’re given so much time to understand how Prabha and Anu are before we know what this film is about, their work, their shit wages, what time their shifts what they like doing after work and this is painted against beautiful, night-time shooting on Mumbai’s trains, markets and busy streets. Our characters often have their moments of introspection set here rather than in isolation, almost like a contrast between individualised and collective experiences.

All We Imagine As Light is a steadily paced, thoroughly pensive drama that leaves you with a sense of what women go through culturally in India with its intimate stakes based on cultural expectations across generations of women but also makes one reflect on themselves, how happy are we serving the whole and is it worth tearing up the rule book?