THE MALAYALI NURSE is a ubiquitous figure in India – and, with patterns of global labour migration in the past few decades, increasingly also across the globe. In All We Imagine as Light, the screenwriter and director Payal Kapadia shows us the human beings behind the uniforms and tells us their stories. Kapadia’s debut fiction feature – and the first Indian film to win the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival, taking the honour earlier this year – All We Imagine as Light travels beyond the confines of the two lead characters’ workplace to take us through their personal journeys in a much wider sense.
Prabha, played by Kani Kusruti, and Anu, played by Divya Prabha, have moved from their home state of Kerala in southern India to the city of Mumbai in the western Indian state of Maharashtra. They are flatmates and employed as nurses at the same hospital. Early on, Prabha learns that Anu has become a subject of gossip among their co-workers because she is in love with a boy. And not just any boy – Shiaz, played by Hridhu Haroon, is a Muslim.
In an India riven by prejudice, the combination of Islamophobia with patriarchy’s proprietorial attitude towards – and infantilisation of – women has long manifested itself as a generalised suspicion of Muslim men. The phenomenon has even been given a name: “love jihad”, a term used to describe the right-wing conspiracy theory that Muslim men are wooing, seducing and marrying gullible Hindu women with the aim of converting them to Islam. Given this context, it is easy to understand why Anu wishes to keep her affair with Shiaz a secret.
Anu’s clandestine inter-community romance is just one of the primary relationships that form the film’s narrative. The others are Prabha’s bond with a middle-aged Maharashtrian colleague called Parvati, played by Chhaya Kadam, who is losing her home to a real-estate developer; and the seeming incompatibility between Prabha and Anu themselves.
All We Imagine as Light is, among many other things, Kapadia’s lyrical homage to migrants and Mumbai. Social schisms and capitalist tyranny are just two out of the several talking points that emerge from it. But in essence, this is a story of friendship, love and acceptance, set against a backdrop of chauvinism and exploitation. Unlike in A Night of Knowing Nothing – her 2021 documentary feature, which won the Golden Eye at Cannes and the Amplify Voices Award at the Toronto International Film Festival – here the director does not spell out her politics. She simply brings her characters alive on screen and nudges us to observe what she observes of them and their environment. This is a deeply political film, but Kapadia makes the politics relatable and accessible by unobtrusively weaving it into the human stories of these characters, written with compassion and depth.
Mainstream Indian cinema rarely foregrounds women’s friendships. Both mainstream Indian cinema and Hollywood rarely regard an individual character – and especially a woman character – as a complete being without a current, potential or past romantic partner. Kapadia defies both trends. Her feminism is most pronounced in the way she underlines Prabha, Anu and Parvati’s self-sufficiency in ways big and small. This is done perhaps most beautifully in a scene in which a bemused Prabha watches the other two dance wildly without an iota of self-consciousness.
True to her feminist moorings, Kapadia also writes men with empathy. She is kind to Dr Manoj, played by Azees Nedumangad, who is attracted to Prabha. Even when Shiaz displays a flash of hypocrisy and conservatism, she treats it with a nuance you will not find in the men-centric stories that dominate commercial cinema worldwide.
All We Imagine as Light is co-produced by Petit Chaos of France and India’s Chalk and Cheese Films. It came out in parts of Europe this month, and in India got a limited release in Kerala in September. This was to meet a requirement of the Film Federation of India (FFI), which selects the country’s entry each year in the race for the Best International Feature Oscar: the film had to be in theatres in India for a minimum of seven days before 30 September. (Much to the chagrin of many Oscar-watchers in India and abroad, in the end the FFI picked the comedy-drama Laapataa Ladies instead.) This weekend, All We Imagine as Light will open the MAMI Mumbai Film Festival. It is scheduled to release across India in November.
So Kapadia’s home audience finally gets to see the work of this astonishingly assured young filmmaker, possessed of conviction, courage and an uncommon gift for storytelling, as well as a voice that is all her own.
PRABHA, IN All We Imagine as Light, is older than Anu. She has allowed herself to stagnate since her husband disappeared after leaving India for a job in Germany. Her inertia is glaring when viewed beside Anu’s energy and effervescence.
When we first meet Prabha, she is not very likeable. But as we get to know her, it is hard not to warm up to this stiff-necked woman, who is supportive of Parvati and generously shares her cramped house with Anu, a comparative newcomer in the metropolis, although the younger woman’s lack of inhibition irritates her. Prabha evolves over the film’s almost two-hour runtime as life and new learnings gradually chip away at her resistance to living.
When watching a film set in one of the most bustling, congested cities in the world, the last thing you might expect is calm. Yet that is what All We Imagine as Light is: calm. Though the plot is fraught with the characters’ mental turmoil, Kapadia purposefully imbues the work with a dreamy tone that might well be her signature.
It’s a tone she has carried forward from A Night of Knowing Nothing, a tone she has refined since her short film Afternoon Clouds, which was showcased in the students’ competition at Cannes 2017. The former examined student demonstrations erupting across India against discriminatory policies targeting religious minorities and oppressed castes, in addition to crackdowns on activism and freedom of expression by the country’s Hindu Right government under Narendra Modi; this included protests that started in late 2019 against a new law, the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), that fast-tracks citizenship applications for select non-Muslim persecuted minorities from Afghanistan, Pakistan and Bangladesh. The exclusion of Muslims under the law fuelled fears that, when combined with the stringent identity proof requirements under the Modi government’s proposed National Register of Citizens (NRC), it would lead to poor Muslims being disenfranchised and erased. Kapadia’s experimental documentary laid the voice of a fictional student of the Film and Television Institute of India in Pune – of which the director herself is an alumnus – over footage of actual events. (Not surprisingly, considering the threats to free speech in Modi’s India, none of the country’s streaming platforms have acquired A Night of Knowing Nothing so far.)
In keeping with Kapadia’s style, All We Imagine as Light feels like a reverie. Despite its vast canvas, it fosters a sense of intimacy with the viewer. Watching it is akin to entering the deepest recesses of the protagonists’ minds and witnessing their innermost thoughts unfold in real time. Kapadia achieves a trance-like effect with the aid of her sound team, and the delicate strains of the film’s score – composed by the Mumbai-based musician Dhritiman Das, also known as Topshe – wafting across scenes shaped by the contemplative cinematography of Ranabir Das. (Incidentally, the Dases are brothers.)
Through much of the film, we hear the characters but do not see them speak. When they say their lines, sometimes their backs are to the audience, sometimes they are outside the frame. The camera does not often rest on their faces to show us moving lips. As a result, a significant proportion of the spoken lines are moody voice-overs. To this are added documentary-like passages featuring an array of apparently real people who ruminate about Mumbai in a multiplicity of Indian languages but do not appear on screen.
The cumulative effect is a cinematic version of a Cubist painting. Kapadia assumes a level of intelligence and initiative in her audience, trusting us to gather these disparate styles along with all the audio, visual and emotional narratives she presents and mix them down in our own imagination.
Ranabir, who was also the director of photography and editor for A Night of Knowing Nothing, complements her efforts by brilliantly juxtaposing motion against stillness. While his compositions capture a city that stops for no one, their overall impact magically takes us beyond this oft-discussed aspect of Mumbai. In one especially striking shot, Prabha holds on to a pole inside a train that rocks gently as it exits a station, the image mimicking a person on a merry-go-round at a fair. In another scene, Anu stands on a railway platform in a moment of frustration while, behind her, a train speeds past.
This is Mumbai like we’ve never seen it before – not defined solely by its crowds or haste or the opportunities it offers, nor just by its grime or its glamour. In Kapadia’s vision, Mumbai is simultaneously ebullient and exhausted. Prabha, Anu and Parvati could well be its avatars. Here the city dances zealously for its favourite deity, Ganapati, but is tired of the romanticisation of “the spirit of Mumbai” – a clichéd euphemism for its denizens’ grudging endurance in the face of collapsing bridges and terror attacks, betrayals by politicians and incessant infrastructural nightmares.
An air of melancholy clings to every frame. This has as much to do with the blue-grey tinge that permeates the film’s palette as with Prabha’s world-weariness and the suffering of “the hands that built this city” (to quote an incidental character) while the moneybags benefit from their labour.
The muted colour scheme increasingly gives way to bursts of brightness in the second half as the proceedings shift from Mumbai to a seaside town in Maharashtra. Here, without warning, we encounter an abstract segment. The film’s transcendental air is undisrupted in this setting – in fact, it peaks in an ancient cave that “seems like another world,” as one character puts it.
IF YOU KNOW MUMBAI, you know that space and privacy are at a premium in this city, infamous for its matchbox-sized flats and astronomical real-estate prices. Not unexpectedly, then, space is a preoccupation for the film’s characters – literally and figuratively. Prabha baulks at her personal space being invaded, which puts her at odds with Anu, who is prone to touch and feel. Meanwhile, Anu needs a space to make out freely with Shiaz, and Parvati needs papers to prove that she owns her residence.
Parvati’s situation echoes a reality Kapadia earlier chronicled in A Night of Knowing Nothing. That film’s coverage of the controversial CAA and NRC pointed to newfound anxieties over identity and residency documents in Modi’s India, since these papers have in certain contexts been used to decide upon people’s very claim to be in the country. Any reference to documentation in today’s India is, therefore, loaded, as it is in this film’s subplot involving Parvati.
Kapadia’s use of language in this script – another example of her quiet but firm political choices – exemplifies how vastly her attitude differs from the mindsets prevailing in Mumbai’s mainstream Hindi film industry, and explains why she is not seen as a part of it despite being Mumbai-based herself. Since most of the principal characters in All We Imagine as Light are first-generation Malayali migrants to Maharashtra, they converse in Malayalam, as such individuals largely would in real life. Keeping in mind the backgrounds of the remaining characters and the other languages spoken in the state, the film also has lines in Hindi and various other Indian languages. This is a far cry from the Hindi industry’s standard practice of mindlessly slapping Hindi onto all settings, including places where it is not actually spoken. Kapadia’s affinity for authenticity in language mirrors practices in some of India’s other film industries – particularly the Malayalam film industry, where Kani and Divya’s professional roots lie.
A film of meditative musings can only be as good as its cast, and the ensemble here has evidently been painstakingly hand-picked. Kani, as Prabha, meticulously calibrates her character’s entire being – her voice, her barely discernible facial expressions, her body language. She sandpapers down the woman’s sharp edges just enough to spotlight her underlying vulnerability and diffidence – which, in time, make her endearing. Kani’s eyes in this film deserve an essay all their own.
Divya, as Anu, is like a candle in a power cut in each of her scenes. She gives her character a playful innocence that, while being grating to Prabha, is measured to a degree that makes her lovable to an observer. Kadam exudes strength as Parvati. The men of the cast are sweet, sensitive and charming.
Putting intellectual dissections aside, if you ask why tears rolled down my cheeks as the camera pulled away from these characters in the last scene, I would struggle to explain. Through poetic reflections on big business versus little people, on displacement, alienation, loneliness and friendship, Kapadia has fashioned All We Imagine as Light into a profound and profoundly stirring saga about finding your place in the world, finding your tribe, and ultimately finding yourself.