The search for love and belonging in Indian filmmaker Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine as Light

Known for Afternoon Clouds (2017) and A Night of Knowing Nothing (2021), Indian filmmaker Payal Kapadia returns with her latest film, All We Imagine as Light (2024), once again collaborating with cinematographer Ranabir Das.

Recently winning the Grand Prix award at this year's Cannes Film Festival, the film, despite its small budget, received support from multiple producers across France (Petit Chaos, Arte France Cinéma), India (Chalk and Cheese Another Birth), the Netherlands (Baldr Film), and Luxembourg (Les Films Fauves).

Set to release in the US on 15 November and on 29 November in the UK, the film follows the lives of three migrant women. It centres on two nurses, Prabha and Anu, from the southern state of Kerala, as well as Parvathy, a woman from Ratnagiri, a district near Mumbai, who works at one of the city's hospitals.

When Parvathy is evicted from her home by ruthless developers, she decides to return to the coastal village of her youth. Prabha and Anu join her for a brief holiday, one that turns out to be a healing experience for all three women.

On making All We Imagine as Light 

In an exclusive interview with The New Arab about the making of the film, Payal and Ranabir explained that it's rare for Indian filmmakers to make realistic films about the working class, especially ones that focus on nurses or migrants in a big city.

They both mentioned that All We Imagine as Light is an exception, as it fits into the Indian New Wave movement, which moves away from melodramatic plots and the usual song-and-dance style of storytelling.

Speaking about why she chose nurses as her protagonists, Payal tells The New Arab: "It was organic. When I was writing the film, I was in the final year of film school. Before that, there were medical situations at home that had compelled me to do hospital duties. In those long hours of waiting at the hospital, I made friends with some of the nurses and got talking to them. I am still in touch with them."

She adds, "They shared stories about their nursing course, their lives as trainees and leaving their homes to work in Mumbai. I have always wanted to make a film about women who come to work in Mumbai, and the nursing space was interesting as a lot of women work in nursing. The profession also has a dichotomy where they cannot show any emotion when they are at the job; there is a kind of holding back, though they have an internal landscape.

“Moreover, all the themes that I wanted to explore — about family, work, and women’s issues like birth control and vasectomy — were being presented to me in the hospital space," says Payal. 

Moving on to a discussion about the representation of nurses as working women by her predecessors, Payal explains, “I was also thinking of how nurses have been represented in films before, like in Satyajit Ray’s Pratidwandi The Adversary set in Kolkata, where the male characters go to meet a nurse, supposedly a ‘loose’ woman who has come to work, leaving her home.

“They are more independent, thus more easy. I was thinking of these connotations, what it means in terms of representation, the actuality, and the inner feelings, and it made sense for me to explore the private love stories of these two nurses (characters).”

The film also comes at an important time, following the August rape and murder of a 31-year-old trainee doctor inside the medical college she worked at in Kolkata. This horrific attack triggered nationwide protests among doctors demanding better security measures for women and bringing focus back to one of India’s biggest rampant problems: a decades-long struggle to curb rising sexual violence against women. 

Passionate love affairs

More than just a languid introspection of the lives of its characters, the film explores themes like relationships, marriage, family, the difference between biological and chosen friendships, caste-based marriages, passionate interfaith love affairs, and, in the Indian context, the idea of a ‘bonafide’ citizen.

Speaking about the themes of family and friendship in the film, Payal says, “Family is a support system codified in our culture, whereas in friendship, those codes are defined by the people who we become friends with.

"We can make a new family with them and cities can facilitate that. In my film, though the women are financially independent, there is a legitimacy of family life, an invisible string that holds them down.”

Expanding on her thoughts, Payal adds, “I am from Mumbai, but I can’t say I have a childhood friend (having been schooled all over the country) from here. On the other hand, my friends are those who have settled in Mumbai. While in film school, I also made friends, and I can say I was dependent on those friendships. So, in the film, I also look into such friendships, including the generational aspect of bonding among these three women.”

The city of Mumbai as a character 

Beyond its main themes, the film is full of symbolism, with the city of Mumbai almost becoming a character that reflects the lives of Prabha, Anu, and Parvathy. For example, the lives of these women unfold against the fast-paced, busy atmosphere of Mumbai, symbolised by one of the city’s most iconic features — the local trains. 

Ultimately, these trains — whether with crowded or sparse interiors, or the sounds of passing local trains — symbolise the constant hustle and chaos of city life. They highlight the contrast between the character's struggles and the relentless pace of the world around them.

The intrepid yet lyrical cinematography of Ranabir heightens this directorial idea, making it relatable to anyone who has lived in a big metropolis like New York, London, or Mumbai, where trains act as a constant rhythm of life. Here, one can’t help but remember another masterful work, In the Mood for Love by Wong Kar-Wai, where rain is used as a recurring pattern, building a distinct cinematic language.

“Mumbai is very much connected by the trains, and everybody’s always going up and down,” says Payal with Ranabir adding, “We felt three things are iconic and unavoidable: the blue tarpaulin during Mumbai monsoons, the ongoing constructions in the city and the local train.

"The train therefore also becomes an important part of the narrative because the characters spend a large part of their day on the train commuting. For us, the local train also created a sense of motion, the idea that Bombay never stops.”  

Cannes win

For this film to win the aforementioned Grand Prix award at Cannes this year is certainly a first for both any Indian filmmaker and any woman filmmaker of Indian origin.

Ranabir breaks down the win: “We had to present the film continuously, whether it was in the form of an idea while seeking writing grants or in script form while sourcing production grants. Because it was grant-based, it was never market-driven, and Payal could make the film she wanted to.”

Payal adds, “These are all government grants, and they don’t need to recover anything.”

The huge international recognition the film has already received is an affirmation that a cinema of one’s ‘own kind’ — interpreted as socially conscious, subtly told, and gently cinematographed using fine cinematic language — can indeed be made.

It has perhaps set the ball of inspiration rolling for many other filmmakers who would love to tell the stories of the invisible, the ordinary, from wherever they are.

For now, Payal and her team are the bearers of that informed yet dreamy courage, luminous, to say the least.

Nilosree Biswas is an author, filmmaker, and columnist who writes about the history, culture, food and cinema of South Asia, the Middle East, Asia and its diaspora