All We Imagine As Light review – Cannes prize-winning Indian drama is a quiet, tender marvel | Drama films

Mumbai is more than a city. It’s an ever-expanding universe. Night shots of the thronged streets in this exquisite, Cannes prize-winning drama by Mumbai-born documentary director turned fiction film-maker Payal Kapadia show the skyline as a shimmering constellation of lights. And behind each flickering window, inside every snaking commuter train, there is a whole world with its own myriad of stories. It’s an idea that Kapadia acknowledges with elegant simplicity at the film’s opening, using documentary techniques, a montage of street scenes and the voices of migrants from around the country drawn to the city for work.

Having captured the teeming collision of lives, she gently guides us to follow three of them. Nurse Prabha (Kani Kusruti) is a veteran at the busy urban hospital where all three work; her younger colleague Anu (Divya Prabha), newly arrived from the south of India, is caught up in the first thrill of romance with her Muslim boyfriend. And Pavarty (Chhaya Kadam), a cook in the hospital kitchen, is facing eviction from a home that is due to be demolished to sate the voracious appetite of gentrification. The women speak different languages – Prabha and Anu converse in Malayalam; Hindi and Marathi are also used. These are ordinary lives, with small sadnesses, twinging regrets and sparks of joy. But through Kapadia’s empathetic lens we realise that these women, like the city that never entirely feels like home for any of them, contain multitudes.

Prabha’s unflappable composure has been disturbed by an unexpected anonymous gift – a rice cooker that may be from her estranged husband in Germany. Anu, meanwhile, is frustrated by the challenge of carving out private time with her boyfriend. Pavarty, recently widowed, has no documentation to prove that she has lived in her home, and thus no rights. And in almost every scene, the clamouring sounds of the city jostle for attention. In the second half of the film, when the women leave Mumbai to accompany Pavarty back to her coastal village, the skies lift, the air clears and the picture takes on a lyrical, dreamlike quality.

It’s a marvel of a movie, with something of the humanist poetry of Satyajit Ray or Edward Yang. And it’s all the more remarkable given that this is Kapadia’s first fiction feature (her 2021 debut film, the documentary A Night of Knowing Nothing, also picked up a prize in Cannes). What a talent.