Mumbai at night. While the camera drives past and captures a market and the hustle and bustle of the streets, various people tell us off-screen what made them move to the Indian megacity: a fight with their father or a secret pregnancy. Only after the introduction, the film’s setting in this place of hope for a better life, for work and money, is when the actual, fictional story of three women begins, for which director and screenwriter Payal Kapadia received the Grand Jury Prize in Cannes 2024.

In the megalopolis, Prabha (Kani Kusruti) works as a nurse. Besides her job, which she dutifully fulfills, she’s barely got time for a private life. Together with her younger colleague Anu (Divya Prabha), Prabha lives in an apartment where rains comes through from time to time. She rarely hears from her husband, who left to work in Germany years ago, but she has accepted her fate. Her roommate Anu is fighting for her happiness: she’s having a relationship with Shiaz (Hridhu Haroon), a young Muslim man, which the couple has to hide from their families of origin. The two search in vain for a place where they can be intimate with each other. Along with protagonists Prabha and Anu, Payal also focuses on a third woman: the older hospital cook Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam), who is threatened with being evicted from her apartment after her husband’s death because she has no papers.

Payal Kapadia, born in 1986, won the Golden Eye Award in Canne for her documentary debut A NIGHT OF KNOWING NOTHING in 2021 and the documentary influence is also clearly evident in her feature film debut ALL WE IMAGINE AS LIGHT. Kapadia presents her hometown Mumbai as a metropolis which is constantly changing and moving, even in the monsoon season, and in which thousands of colorful lights sparkle at night, running through the film as a visual motif and symbol of hope in dark times. But, most of all, she shows Mumbai from the female perspective of her protagonists, who move through the huge city on foot, in trains, trams or buses, work in the same hospital and take care of women's health in particular.

Kapadia manages to capture the lives of her protagonists in both a realistic and poetic way. She combines contemplative, often nighttime scenes of the big city, accompanied by light-hearted piano music, with messages that pop up on the screen that Anu and her boyfriend exchange, or poems that Prabhas' admirer, Dr. Manoj (Azees Nedumangad), who has problems with the Hindi language and feels like a stranger in Mumbai, writes for her. With a slow pace, Kapadia depicts the everyday of three women whose freedom is taken away in many ways: their love, their home, and their most personal decisions.

While the open, confident, rebellious Anu making more and more concrete plans to sleep with her boyfriend even though the hospital colleagues are already gossiping about her, Prabha receives a package from Europe: her husband sent her a fancy rice cooker from Germany, which from now on reminds her of the foreign body of the man who is so strange to her. One night, she confides in Anu that her father arranged their marriage. "I don't think I could do that," replies the younger woman. The situation changes in the last part of the film when we move away from Mumbai, previously known as the "city of illusions": Prabha and Anu accept Parvaty's invitation to Ratnagiri, her home village on the coast, and there, where the earth shimmers red, sometimes in places in nature that are traditionally associated with women, such as the sea, the forest or a cave, the women can live out their love, albeit in different, more or less real ways.

With atmospheric, impressive images, Payal Kapadia tells a story of female yearning within patriarchy and the solidarity among women, giving the oppressed a voice – and lets men show weakness. For her feminist, socially critical, and rousing film, the first Indian film in the Cannes competition in 30 years, Kapadia has rightfully received many awards. As shocking as it is to see how many rights the three protagonists are denied, the filmic moments in which the friends of different ages rebel in their own way - drinking alcohol, dancing, swimming in the sea or throwing stones at the discriminatory poster (“Class is a privilege. Reserved for the privileged.”) of the construction company that is taking away Parvaty's home - are liberating.

ALL WE IMAGINE AS LIGHT gives hope for the future of women in India – and for other feminist films from the culturally and cinematically diverse subcontinent: Anu, the youngest of the women, no longer puts up with what was taken for granted for Prabha's generation, despite all the resistance - and Prabha understands her better and better.

Stefanie Borowsky (INDIEKINO MAGAZIN)

Translation: Elinor Lewy