“As the first Indian feature invited to compete at Cannes in nearly three decades, Payal Kapadia’s narrative début would be notable enough; that the movie is so delicately felt and sensuously textured is cause for outright celebration.”
—Justin Chang, The New Yorker

“It is both dreamlike and like waking up from a dream. This is a glorious film.”
—Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian

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 (whose husband from an arranged marriage is 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 a 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.