All We Imagine As Light
The light, the lives, and the textures of contemporary, working-class Mumbai are explored and celebrated by writer/director Payal Kapadia, who won the Grand Prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival for her revelatory fiction feature debut. Centering on two roommates who also work together in a city hospital—head nurse Prabha (Kani Kusruti) and recent hire Anu (Divya Prabha)—plus their coworker, cook Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam), Kapadia’s film alights on moments of connection and heartache, hope and disappointment. Prabha, her husband from an arranged marriage living in faraway Germany, is courted by a doctor at her hospital; Anu carries on a romance with a Muslim man, which she must keep secret from her strict Hindu family; Parvaty finds herself dealing with a sudden eviction from her apartment. Kapadia captures the bustle of the metropolis and the open-air tranquility of a seaside village with equal radiance, articulated by her superb actresses and by the camera with a lyrical naturalism that occasionally drifts into dreamlike incandescence. All We Imagine as Light is a soulful study of the transformative power of friendship and sisterhood, in all its complexities and richness.
Director: Payal Kapadia
Distributor: Janus Films
Genre: Drama
Languages: Malayalam, Hindi
Run time: 1h 58
Countries: France, India, Luxembourg, The Netherlands, Italy
Awards: Cannes Grand Prix, NY Film Critics Circle Award for Best International Film, etc.
This Film Festival is generously funded by a grant from the Albertine Cinémathèque, which
is part of the French for All initiative by Villa Albertine (the French Institute for Culture and
Education, a division of the French Embassy in the US) and Albertine Foundation and is
made possible by the support of the Centre National du Cinéma et de l’Image Animée
(CNC).
COMMUNITY SPONSORS:
Art Theater of °µÍøÊÓƵ
Alliance Française of Newport Beach
