‘All We Imagine as Light’ Review: Payal Kapadia’s Powerful Look at Women’s Lives in an Ever-Changing India | TIFF

The first lighthouse in recorded history was the Pharos of Alexandria, built in 280 BC. It towered upon the shore of Ancient Egypt, the vast flame within its hearth lighting the night and stormy skies above it. I think, sometimes, of the people who saw that towering flame for the first time. I want to know who was afraid, who felt some sense of awe, and who thought nothing of it because they simply had too much work to do that day. I think, sometimes, of how the first sailors in a boat felt when they saw the burnt orange wicks lick the onyx sky. If they were grateful for the warning or afraid that the danger before them now seemed imminent.

Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine as Light evokes those very questions but about the skyscrapers that pierce the skies above Mumbai. It’s a cliched thing to say that a city is a character in film, but I have never seen Mumbai photographed this way. The city isn’t framed as if the film is speaking to it just to establish a location or a sense of place for the audience. Rather, All We Imagine as Light is in conversation with the city in the context of how it intersects with the characters and their lives, how they view the city and how it views them, should it choose to acknowledge them at all. Prabha (Kani Kusruti), Anu (Divya Prabha), and Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam), all of whom are nurses trying to find their own pathways in a city whose promises to them have not yet been fulfilled.

India is changing, and rapidly at that. It’s something I hear in my own home often. My family go back to my homeland of Punjab and talk about how the shimmering new malls in Punjab stand in such sharp contrast to the emptying, decaying malls of the United States. But while that change is real, what is change without an understanding of its material effects? It’s just a word, thrown around with an expected connotation of positivity. A billboard promising a new Mumbai with a light-skinned, heterosexual couple next to a tower of luxury flats draws ire from two women walking down the street. For they know, as women trying to seek their own autonomy, that without the right type of man that promise is not intended for them.

All We Imagine has a sharp structure at its foundation that doesn’t rely on plot. Rather, it trusts the audience to form their own bonds with these women and their journeys in a rapidly metamorphosing society. It’s gorgeous in the lushness of its emotions, lushness made all the deeper and moving by how often it pauses to let the women speak for themselves. The technical proficiencies of the character work are deft, from the writing to the cinematography to the score sprinkling throughout the story like droplets from petrichor. But the deftness of that work is brought to life by a transcendent set of performances from the entire cast. There are numerous frames in the film where the actors are able to convey the weight of a life bearing down upon those trying to continue living it.

Prabha is trying to grapple with that change as a woman in a state of limbo. Her husband is not there, having gone to Germany to work, but neither has he severed the bonds between them fully. Responding to a changing India around her requires Prabha to exercise some types of agency that she was never raised to acknowledge as being real, actionable options. Anu is trying to exercise her own agency in pursuing a relationship that crosses religious boundaries and in every moment of joy carries forth a haunting specter of right-wing bloodshed against religious and ethnic minorities in India. 

And Parvaty finds that a changing India means that she no longer has a guaranteed home, that this glimmering new country full of lights brighter than the stars is leaving her outside of its warmth. That her hands were part of the labor that built this new India from the old burnishes her anger and rightfully so. And it’s not lost on her that her ability to live under a roof is threatened only after her husband’s death, so for all the transformation, India continues to be a place where women are punished for exercising their autonomy. But they simply must continue to do so and there’s a real weight to the film’s exploration of just how exhausting and powerful resilience can be.

So it feels like a bit of a miracle, every bit of joy and laughter and kindness these women experience as they traverse their own realities of loneliness. How they refuse, in small ways and otherwise, to accept a changing reality in which their decisions are made for them. How they realize that their autonomy can be strengthened by strengthening their connections with each other. For it’s the light we find within each other that allows us to find more of it within ourselves. It’s the light we find within ourselves that allows us to find kinship with others and therefore grow. There is brightness and darkness and loneliness and camaraderies under the skyscraper and under the tree. A place we can imagine with all the light but the place itself will always be a vessel, simply a vessel, and never the source of light itself. That remains firmly in the souls inhabiting that place and the bonds they form with one another as the sun sets and rises and sets and rises once more.

Grade: A

This review is from the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival. Janus Films/Sideshow will release All We Imagine as Light in select theaters on November 15.