After garnering critical acclaim across the globe and winning the prestigious Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival last year, All We Imagine as Light is currently out of the Oscar race with no nominations.
Earlier, the Film Federation of India picked Laapataa Ladies over All We Imagine as Light as India’s official entry to the Academy Awards or the Oscars, leading to controversy and debate within the film fraternity. The film also won accolades in various international awards circuits including nominations in both the Golden Globes Award and in the upcoming BAFTA awards. Despite its successful run last year, debates and discussions have emerged questioning if the film is deserving of all the awards hype.
Many Indian films have explored the precarity of migrant lives in big cities. In particular, Mumbai, with its blend of seductive hope and uncertainty, has come to symbolise a form of urban estrangement, where marginalised lives constantly teeter between promise and disillusionment. All We Imagine as Light is not the first film to have addressed this, nor is it one that has done it the best. What sets Payal Kapadia’s award-winning debut feature film apart, however, is the gentleness with which it is able to navigate the tenuous ground of urban anxiety and dysphoria.
The film opens with flaneur-like shots of Mumbai’s bustling crowds that move like a beast with a shared consciousness. These visuals are contrasted by personal voiceovers recounting what led different individuals to the sprawling metropolis. The opening shots of the film set the tone, establishing two opposing worlds: The sterile, isolating rhythm of city life and the emotional landscapes of those caught within it.
The film carries this forward through the lives of Prabha (Kani Kusruti), a nurse working in a Mumbai hospital, and her younger colleague and roommate, Anu (Divya Prabha). Prabha and Anu are a lesson in contrasts. Prabha is introverted and bound to a strict code of decorum and duty, while Anu hungers for autonomy and new experiences.
Over time, we learn that Prabha is married, through an arranged union, to a man who works as a factory labourer in Germany. They haven't spoken in over a year, and the only contact she has with him is a rice cooker he sends from Germany. Anu, on the other hand, is in a secret relationship with a Muslim boy (Hridhu Haroon) and goes to great lengths to both meet him and hide the relationship from her roommate and colleagues.
In the mix is Parvaty, portrayed by the talented Chhaya Kadam, last seen in her powerful performance in Laapataa Ladies. Parvaty is a middle-aged widow working in the hospital canteen. Unlike Prabha and Anu, she owns a home in the city — a home she can no longer protect from a real estate takeover. Together the three form an unlikely bond. Both migrants from Kerala, Prabha and Anu are navigating the complexities of living in Mumbai, a city that both gives and takes from them in different ways. While Prabha adheres to a strict work-home routine, symbolic of her own tethering to the role of a duty-bound wife to an absent husband, Anu uses the city’s anonymity to shield her secret romance.
Sisterhood has been a key theme in discussions around All We Imagine as Light, but the film also delves into the complicated ways women navigate around each other. Prabha disapproves of Anu’s behaviour and feels conflicted when she discovers Anu’s affair. The networks of knowledge among women both empower and disempower, as seen when Prabha tries to help Parvaty secure legal aid, contrasting with another nurse who attempts to reveal Anu’s affair with a Muslim man to Prabha.
Male characters don’t even appear until around 10 minutes into the film and the first mention of a man is almost spectral. Prabha’s dementia-ridden patient describes a haunting hallucination of her late husband, a shadowing of Prabha’s own marital torment. Men remain peripheral figures in the narrative — Anu’s secret lover, Prabha’s absent husband, and the shy Malayali doctor (Azees Nedumangad) courting Prabha. Even in these brief appearances, men seem more like echoes than real presences.
This idea reaches its peak toward the end of the film, which takes an unexpected turn into magical realism, where Prabha seems to exorcise her husband’s presence from her psyche through the act of saving a male stranger who has washed up on the village shore. Earlier, in one of the film’s most poignant moments, Prabha clings to the rice cooker sent by her husband in a silent attempt to bridge the gap between her loneliness and his absence. The male gaze is conspicuously absent from this world and is replaced by a close view of the complex lives of women who are trying to navigate a world that does not particularly centre them.
As a reflection of the dichotomy at its heart, the film unfolds in two distinct halves: The first half, firmly grounded in the city, adheres to a documentary-like precision. Its still, sometimes tightly framed shots capture the contradictions of the city — the paradox of freedom and anonymity coexisting with an unforgiving, predatory capitalism that devours the poor and vulnerable at every opportunity. Kapadia refuses to overdramatise the city’s brutality, instead opting for subtle visual metaphors — the dull glow of apartment windows, snaking metro tracks, silent bus rides — to signify urban loneliness, showcasing her mastery over subliminal storytelling.
In contrast, the second half transports us to a tiny, secluded Maharashtrian village. Here, the film expands into wide shots and a loose and bolder narrative structure. In the latter half, the rural space is positioned as an ideological antithesis to the city — a place where characters can exhale and catharsis is allowed. Does this work? It certainly has its moments. Anu and her boyfriend Shiaz’s conversation inside a cave stands out as tender and vulnerable. However, the seaside village as an alternative to the oppressive city seems a tad too contrived.
The film’s shift to the rural, while visually freeing, cuts short the raw tension so carefully built in the first half.
Kapadia’s filmmaking, as evidenced in her previous work A Night of Knowing Nothing, inhabits the space between the poetic and the political. Her earlier film used an epistolary narrative to intertwine personal letters between lovers who have been estranged due to caste differences with footage of student protests and life inside India’s foremost film campus. In the film she depicts a politically charged landscape by juxtaposing student unrest and personal longing to draw a searing critique of contemporary India.
In All We Imagine as Light, Kapadia continues to explore the political, but here the ambition is tempered down and turned inward to the personal, to illuminate the emotional and existential toll of systemic forces on its characters. Some might see this departure as the filmmaker limiting herself, while others may see it as her evolving as a storyteller to explore more nuanced and compelling storytelling where the politics threads through the fabric of characters’ emotional journeys.
To call All We Imagine as Light hyped would be to disregard its important strengths — it lays bare, with precision, the absurdity of harbouring notions like freedom and liberty in the context of capitalism in megacities that fuels its expansion by feeding on the vulnerable. In this, the film displays a level of craft that is masterful in its gender sensitivity and politics. However, the second half, presenting the rural space as a utopian counterpoint with fable-like strokes, feels ideologically simplified and dilutes the tight and incisive narrative that the first half so skilfully builds up.
However, this dissonance — the unevenness of the tense first half giving way to the lyrical, almost contrived second — must be seen more as feature than a flaw. The fragmented structure of the film, the shift between reality and almost-fantasy and the refusal to tie the two halves neatly is what makes the film an honest, if not seamless, examination of characters trapped between worlds that promise so much but rarely deliver. Kapadia’s focus on interiority and the quiet, personal struggles of migrant, blue-collar working women, through an understated and humanistic lens is a major win for the film.
Ultimately, All We Imagine as Light is a film of contrasts — some moments radiant, others faltering. It shines brightest in how it weaves the personal into the political, transforming the mundane into the poetic. It offers a kind of catharsis, not through overt triumph, but in its quiet acknowledgment that even fictional lives deserve the solace of dissolving into fantasy, if only to escape the claustrophobic grasp of the world.