All We Imagine as Light review by Tudor Lazea (2/17/25)

In Mumbai’s hustling heartbeat, Payal Kapadia films her debut feature and takes a step away from her documentary work, but a cautious step, one that carries with it a legacy of observing life. In a great example of Maya Deren’s theory of the vertical exploration of poetry – that poetry examines not a narrative but an instantaneous feeling of a moment –  the film opens with a documentary passage, tracking the street markets of Mumbai from a car, intertwined with bodiless voices of the people, one claiming it’s “afraid to call [Mumbai] home”. The city itself is a character, it has a personality – albeit it doesn’t express itself as coherently as our main cast would – it takes action, it takes time from you (as a character narrates). We see later when Prabha (played by an amazing Kani Kusruti), reads her unrequited admirer’s poetry in her room at night, and the open window shows the train move through the skyscrapers and behind her head, one can’t help but feel the city had its say in the matter.

Prabha and Anu (Divya Prabha) share an apartment and work together as nurses at a hospital, and the film takes advantage of this first microcosm to explore and explain the taboos and hypocrisies of societal norms. A patient comes in asking about vasectomies for her husband, only to change her mind because he told her “it drains their energy’.” Hence she decides to take birth control herself. Anu has a secret lover and Prabha, consciously or not, projects her own fears of judgement upon Anu – telling her what everyone thinks of her. Yet the film refuses to be a dark parable of city life, and is enveloped instead by a sense of love and caring. The monsoon season, which in cities like Mumbai can lead to floods and disruptive transportation issues, is transformed by Prabha as she tells her boyfriend that she is “sending [him] kisses through the clouds,” which fall with love through the rain. Still, the systematic oppression and structural violence the main cast deals with through the entire movie is ever present, though opposed by the characters’ resilience to give in. When the cook of the hospital, Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam), is kicked out of her home, which is to be replaced by a skyscraper, she hesitantly decides to move back to her village; it is revealed to be a small paradise itself – and it is where the film spends its second half. She leaves behind a small gesture of rebellion ,as she throws a couple of rocks with Prabha at the billboard advertisement of the skyscraper, showing a white nuclear family next to a not so small statement “Class is a privilege reserved for the privileged.”

Once at the village, the film delights with some of its best passages, from a nearly drowned man taking in his first breath of life as the water hits the shore, to the hypnagogic cave where Anu describes her escapist desires for another world. Will our characters find some comfort from the alienating great city in the rural town and forest near the beach, or will they separate further like waves on the blank shore? As tensions grow, due to Anu’s secret lover, Shiaz, and Prabha’s attempt at finding some inner peace after her husband has left for Germany without a call in a year, we get a powerful montage of body parts, as Anu and Shiaz have their hidden affair. It’s mostly implied, but through a touch of the hair, goosebumps forming on skin, and short gazes at one another, the honesty of the moment and desire are palpable.

In a movie preoccupied by language (containing from the very start dialogue in Malayalam, Hindi and Marathi), and the inability to communicate (a reoccurring preoccupation of cinema), Kapadia finds a way to show us and give weight to the important and insignificant moments. With multiple two-shot dialogue scenes that let the actors act, and time pass, with rhythm, and off-screen space used for both humor and to draw out tension, it’s little wonder that Payal Kapadia won many prizes worldwide, including the prestigious Cannes Festival Grand Prix. All We Imagine as Light also made the Cahiers du Cinéma’s annual top 10 list. We can consider ourselves lucky to have a local premiere at our Campus Theatre of such work.

All We Imagine as Light ends with a second microcosm: as the main cast unites for a conversation on the beach at night, the bar’s neon lights surround them like the illuminated windows of skyscrapers and the street lamps of the great city of Mumbai. And as the audience leaves the theater to the neon cinema signs, we can’t help but wonder where our own place is in society, within the fragile norms and expectations bestowed upon us and our bodies in continuously tumultuous political times.

Tudor Lazea (2027) is majoring in Environmental Engineering with a minor in Film/Media Studies. He writes reviews as the Editor-in-Chief: Publications for the Film Club and loves going to Campus Theatre screenings.