Payal Kapadia’s directorial feature debut, All We Imagine as Light, is a poetic film about millions of invisible immigrants and their lives in Mumbai. Migrants from all over the country move to Mumbai city in search of a better life but struggle to belong in all its colours, fast-paced routine, loneliness and alienation therein.
Kapadia’s storytelling in All We Imagine as Light is one of a kind. There is sadness, quiet, noise, happiness, and joy packed within the same screen. There are fears that bind the characters to things. In the story, some of them defy those fears; some never overcome them. There are women whose lives have been socially backgrounded as mothers, nurses, cooks, house help, etc., at the forefront of the story. There are also undercurrents to modern India, which is aspirational but simultaneously orthodox. Therefore, on the screen, one encounters defining and defying class relations, food choices, cultural and religious values, and dressing sensibilities.
Just as the film begins, there is a sense of the blurred city life in fast motion—all too buzzy, all too transient, all too invisible. The first few shots seem like a documentary into the lives of the subaltern—the common people, who are at the margins. But, very soon, the story begins to set itself up in a hospital. Kapadia traces the lives of three women: two Malayali nurses who are flatmates and hospital help and cook—Anu (Divya Prabha), Prabha (Kani Kusruti), and Parvathy (Chhaya Kadam). In these three women, the film captures the everydayness of loneliness, longing, desires, intimacy, and oppression of the invisible women in Indian cities.
Prabha is a senior nurse at the hospital awaiting the return of her long-estranged husband, who is working in Germany. Anu is a nurse who is in love with a Muslim boy, Abdul, at the height of religious tensions in India, and its effects are seen throughout. Parvathy is a cook at the hospital who is battling eviction from her house, where she has stayed for over twenty years. Each of their lives is immersed in the hustle and bustle of Mumbai.
At the start of the movie, Prabha receives a letter containing a high-tech rice cooker that appears to have been sent from Germany, where her husband works. There is no note with it—or not even an address about who may have sent it. In the story, we see that Manoj, a doctor from Kerala who has been deputed to work at the hospital where Prabha works, shows an interest in Prabha. He shows her the poem he has written and published. But he seems to be dismayed by the prospect of being in Mumbai, learning Hindi, and working without fully embracing the city.
In this sense, as a dialogue goes, Mumbai is just an illusion—whether you have stayed twenty years or two years—you never get used to it. Parvathy feels that despite her long association with Mumbai, her life has been uprooted by the absence of a paper record that documents her stay. In one of the scenes in the film, both Parvathy and Prabha hurled stones at the poster that read: “Class is a privilege that can be enjoyed by the privileged”.
Anu, meanwhile, is a rebellious, happy girl who is deeply in love. She cannot digest the idea that one could marry a person without ever knowing them fully. Anu is carefree. She finds ways to feel intimate—in places where part of India still finds intimacy: in car parking lots, in tree shades, inside the forest, at midnight in oblivion, where you can escape the wrath of the family and the gaze of a stranger.
The musical in between scenes and the lights all through—in its blurred and bright vision—make for a brilliant movie. The local train and its passengers, in their various incarnations, are recurring imagery that sustains Mumbai in all its flavours. The dialogues throughout are hard-hitting: “When someone goes abroad, they either lose their mind or lose their memory”; “You think you might know someone, but even they would become strangers”; “We are just papers—fragile, transient, and replaceable”; and “Those living on the periphery often vanish, leaving behind little to no trace or noise”.
Class and gender norms take centre stage in the storyline of All We Imagine as Light. Divya Prabha and Kani Kusruti show their brilliance in their mastery of acting. Just as in her character in Laapata Ladies, Chhaya Kadam delivers a sincere performance in this movie. Payal Kapadia captures the beauty and despair that follow urban spaces, the changing nature of class relations, the expectations deemed on genders, and the loneliness that arises out of the everydayness of single working women. And it is no surprise that the movie premiered at the 77th Cannes Film Festival and is ranked number one in the New York Times and Obama’s movies list, among others.
Cover Photo by Aditya Chache on Unsplash