Of Light

Payal Kapadia is a director of romances. Not the fairytale kind, but the kind in which desire struggles against violently unromantic forces: religion, caste, marriage. At the center of each of her films—three shorts and two features—are women who confess their dreams about absent lovers and husbands. These men reappear as memories, occasionally as apparitions. In the short Afternoon Clouds (2017), set in an unnamed Indian city, an elderly middle-class woman and her young Nepali caretaker stare at a white flower on a potted plant. “How long will it last?” the younger woman asks. “Two days,” the mistress tells her, recalling how her husband coaxed seasonal plants to flower all year long.

Later, as the older woman takes her siesta, a sailor from the caretaker’s village visits with a postcard from Africa. He reads her the English lettering: “The wind, the trees, they are but a dream. In front of you, even the stars look dull.” Without explaining what the words mean, he returns to the docks. When the mistress wakes from her nap, she recounts a dream about her departed husband. “He didn’t recognize me at all,” she says. Her aide stares out the window.

It’s this slippage between women’s longing and the dogged grip of reality—not least of India’s unyielding social divisions—that defines Kapadia’s work. “I think I am making the same films again and again,” she has said. She isn’t wrong. Across her films, it’s not just women and their dreams that reappear but also the images that frame them. The feathery white clouds hovering over south Indian hills in The Last Mango Before the Monsoon (2015) thicken into the pesticide fumes that float past apartment buildings in Afternoon Clouds. Sequences of dense foliage reappear in her most impressive short, And What Is the Summer Saying (2018), and in all three films the forest becomes a realm of fantasy, where belief isn’t bound to Hindu laws. As a character says in a voiceover: “gods are not here.”

Sometimes footage from one film recurs in another. A shot of a makeshift shrine passed by a stream of cars from The Last Mango is repurposed in black and white in Kapadia’s first feature, A Night of Knowing Nothing (2021). This essay-like film interlaces documentary sequences of student activism and police brutality in India with fictional love letters that a young woman sends to her lover from a higher caste. Most episodes unfold within campus buildings, but periodically the camera loiters before treetops, as if gesturing toward the forest.

All We Imagine as Light (2024), Kapadia’s first fiction feature, took several years to come together. Its seeds, she says, lie in her time as a student at the Film and Television Institute of India in Pune, where she also made her shorts. In a sense the film is a feature-length exposition of a single shot from The Last Mango—a patchwork of illuminated windows in a lower-middle-class neighborhood in Mumbai. Now the people bustling inside those frames have gotten a movie of their own. 

Kapadia, who is thirty-nine, grew up surrounded by art. Her mother, Nalini Malani, is a well-known painter and among India’s first video artists. As a child Kapadia watched Malani paint every day for almost eight hours. As an adult she builds on her mother’s collagist approach by using drawings, superimposed text, and archival home videos within her films. All We Imagine as Light, which won the Grand Prix at Cannes in 2024, departs from this treatment. Kapadia pares down the visual experimentation, fills out the characters, and gives them a cohesive storyline: a complex, restrained chronicle of women in urban India that does not overplay its feminist politics. 

Anchoring the film are Prabha (Kani Kusruti) and Anu (Divya Prabha), nurses from Kerela working in Mumbai; they speak to one another in Malayalam and not Hindi. (Kerala, which has India’s highest literacy rate, provides a significant portion of the country’s medical workers.) The women share a congested flat in the suburbs and travel for hours on overcrowded trains for their hospital shifts. Shot during Mumbai’s monsoon, a decisively unpleasant season between June and September when the city’s innards overflow onto the streets, the film lingers on Prabha and Anu trudging through the muck. They are independent working women, but neither is at home. 

In her late thirties, Prabha is an experienced professional and a stickler for propriety. She reprimands trainees when they squirm at the sight of placenta. Her husband (it’s an arranged marriage) lives in Germany and has not been in touch in over a year. When a Malayali doctor, Manoj (Azees Nedumangad), discloses his feelings for her, she simply says, “May I go, doctor? I’ll miss my train.” Although a part of her wants to explore this prospect (in the middle of the night she reads a poem by Manoj by flashlight), another part still hopes for her husband’s return. One day a high-end rice cooker arrives in the mail from Germany without a sender’s name. In a devastating scene, while mopping up her rain-flooded kitchen, Prabha caresses the appliance and pulls it close between her legs. 

Anu is younger and less concerned with rules. She’s playful at work and slightly careless with money (twice she asks Prabha to cover her portion of the rent). Behind Prabha’s back, she is also in a relationship with Shiaz (Hridhu Haroon), a Muslim man from Kerala. As Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou’s nimble jazz-piano riffs trail them on the soundtrack, the couple steals hours whenever they can, making out in empty parking lots. But without any private space of their own, they can never seem to have sex. 

In another life Anu might have married Shiaz, but her Hindu parents, on the lookout for a more appropriate husband, send her stiffly posed pictures from matchmaking sites. Scrolling through the suitors, Shiaz offers to create a profile of himself under a Hindu name, but Anu knows it’s a lost cause. (Kapadia never tells us this, but across India Hindu nationalist vigilantes are attacking interfaith couples for their alleged complicity in a bogus phenomenon called “love jihad.”) Besides, she isn’t even sure if she wants to marry right now.

At the hospital Prabha and Anu have also befriended the cook, Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam), a fiery Marathi-speaking middle-aged woman from Ratnagiri district, south of Mumbai. Like thousands from their region, her late husband came to the city to work in textile mills that have long since gone bust. Now her tenement room is being taken over by a builder who has erected a billboard that reads CLASS IS A PRIVILEGE. The builder denies that Parvaty, who lacks the paperwork, has any claim to a redeveloped flat. When Prabha’s efforts to get her pro-bono counsel lead to a dead end, Parvaty decides to return to her village. The two nurses offer to help her move.

Here the action shifts to a bucolic setting by the sea and forest—that space of possibility so familiar from Kapadia’s earlier films. Away from the clatter of Mumbai the hours in a single day expand imperceptibly, recalling the slow delirium of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s cinema, which Kapadia has cited as an influence. The women drink, dance, and waste time. Anu, who has used the trip as an opportunity to get away with Shiaz, finally has sex with him amid a thicket of trees. Prabha resuscitates a man rescued from drowning. A local presumes him to be her husband, and he asks her in Malayalam to come away with him, promising it will be different this time. Is he real or a figment of her imagination? Kapadia wants us to believe he is both. 

Most critics have understood All We Imagine as Light as an honest portrait of an unforgiving city. (Mira Nair’s Salaam Bombay is the invariable comparison.) Echoing Kapadia’s previous films, it opens with documentary audio of migrants speaking in different languages: I’ve lived here for twenty-three years, but I feel afraid to call it home. I was pregnant, but I didn’t tell anyone because I’d recently found a job at a house. And yet it eschews the kind of social realism that typifies, say, Indian Parallel Cinema of the 1970s, which was marked by low-budget aesthetics and pronounced left-wing values.

It might be tempting to read All We Imagine as Light as a journey from the grinding drudgery of the city to the fantastical liberation of rural life. But even Mumbai, in Kapadia’s rendition, is never entirely real. The film’s achingly beautiful, blue-toned cinematography—shot by Ranabir Das—is tinged with a quiet idealism. Because the nurses are of a higher class (and likely, caste) than Parvaty, the depth of their friendship is unusual—and a claim against social hierarchies. The women communicate in Hindi, a language in which none of them is at ease.

Kapadia drives the point home in a scene of Prabha accompanying Parvaty to an anti-caste housing rights meeting. A speaker at the event shouts in Marathi: “We built their buildings! We cleaned their gutters, cooked their food…. But when we ask for a home near theirs, they can’t stand it!” In the real world, a Malayali nurse would be unlikely to attend a Marathi housing rights gathering, let alone get Chinese food with her working-class colleague after. 

The improbable solidarity between the three women crystalizes in the final scene. Prabha, Parvaty, and Anu are sitting at a café by the beach. Two of them have made choices: Parvaty to start afresh in the village and Prabha to move on from her marriage. But Anu, whose relationship with Shiaz has been exposed, has no clear path forward. Desperate to be accepted by the more traditional sister-figure, she is surprised when Prabha softens and invites Shiaz to their table. In the shelter of the older women, for this one evening, Anu can openly live her romance. 

As Prabha nervously tries to make conversation with Shiaz, the camera pulls out. The women shrink to silhouettes, and we see the café’s thatched-roof construction, trimmed with pink and green fairy lights. In the background, inside a tin shed stocked with jars of candy and popcorn packets, the boy who manages the café bobs with his earphones in. The camera withdraws even further, and the café lights retreat against a starry sky. 

This ending might seem too sweet, but the artifice is deliberate. Kapadia borrowed the title “All We Imagine as Light” from a series of large, circular paintings that her mother made about military-occupied Kashmir, inspired by the poetry of Agha Shahid Ali. Malani’s melancholic figures—stranded in an industrially dismembered landscape—look to the past, as if channeling lines from Ali’s poem “Of Light”: “From History tears learn a slanted understanding/of the human face torn by blood’s bulletin of light.” 

Kapadia uses the title to nudge at the future. Her project has always been to manifest her characters’ most wishful desires, if only as dreams. The oasis of coconut trees and fairy lights is meant to be tacky, impermanent. This isn’t a light that reveals the truth. Here between the stars and LED strings, the women, unencumbered by their dissatisfactions in that other world, can revel in a light that just about holds.