By Steve Erickson

All We Imagine As Light is an absorbing celebration of female friendship.

All We Imagine As Light, directed by Payal Kapadia. Malayalam and Hindi with English subtitles. Screening at the Coolidge Corner Theatre starting January 17. It is sold out, but there will be a special preview screening of the film, followed by a Q&A with filmmaker Payal Kapadia, at the Coolidge Corner Theatre on January 9.

Kani Kusruti and Divya Prabha in a scene from All We Imagine As Light. Photo: Janus Films

All We Imagine As Light resonates with echoes of Wong Kar-wai’s gritty portrait of Hong Kong — it is a city symphony etched in shades of black and blue. Director Payal Kapadia presents Mumbai as draining yet seductive. The city’s guiding economic ethos is epitomized by a billboard for a new luxury apartment building: “Class is a privilege reserved for the privileged.” (Two characters are so infuriated when they see it they throw rocks at the ad.) It is envisioned as a city of transients. A segment features a succession of documentary images as a voice-over reads letters sent back home by people who moved to the city to work. Focusing on the experience of three nurses, the film depicts urban life as essentially a lonely, wearying grind. Other people’s lives depend on their work — but they’re not paid or treated fairly.

Despite the exploitation, this isn’t the whole story. Even at its grimiest, All We Imagine As Light searches for, and finds, beauty in its tumultuous surroundings. Most of the scenes take place in Mumbai at night, when the city’s streets are colorfully vibrant. Distorted by constant rain, the city’s lights twinkle like Christmas decorations. (Kapadia shot this part of the film during monsoon season.) Cinematographer Ranabir Das makes good on the film’s title; he has a remarkable capacity for using light to bring out the essence of a scene, for suggesting varied emotions with color and camera movement. Take note: the long take that plays out over the closing credits is a gift to patient spectators. His eye keeps the film from turning into a simplistic tract about urban alienation.

Initially, Prabha (Kani Kusruti) and Anu (Divya Prabha) are strictly roommates: two nurses who live together for convenience. Their relationship is even a touch unfriendly. Both have secrets that jeopardize their ability to get along. Both are also limited by the repressive expectations society places on women. Anu, who is Hindu, is dating a Muslim man, Shiaz (Hridu Haroon). She can’t admit this to her family (at one point, Shiaz asks if he should adopt a fake name). Meanwhile, she needs to put on a burqa to visit him in his own neighborhood. She won’t tell Prabha the truth about the relationship, and Prabha suspiciously cautions her “Don’t you know what people are saying about you?” On the other hand, Prabha shares an arranged marriage with a man who is working in Germany. The relationship appears to be collapsing. Prabha panics when her husband mails her a package that contains a rice cooker: the gift either hints at an impending return or it is an open acknowledgment that their marriage is meaningless. As huge cranes fill Mumbai streets and construction projects reshape the city, a third nurse, Parvati (Chhyata Kadam), is forced out of her home. The crises compel all three women — with Shiaz tagging along — to travel back to the village where Parvati grew up. After the brusqueness of its early scenes, All We Imagine As Light becomes an absorbing celebration of female friendship.

Director Kapadia became the toast of Cannes last May because the film was India’s first movie in competition at the festival for 30 years. There was some controversy: she faced an outstanding charge back home, dating to an arrest in a 2015 protest. She has been politically active from the beginning of her career. Her first feature, the 2021 semidocumentary A Night of Knowing Nothing, fearlessly addressed India’s turn toward repression and authoritarianism. (It went unreleased within India.) The movie, through the narrative strategy of a series of letters read in voice-over, dramatized the real-life conflict at her film school, the Film and Television Institute of India. Indian-Australian film critic Kamayani Sharma called the movie a distillation of “the experience of being young in a time of fascism.”

All We Imagine As Light is a subtler examination of those issues: class conflict and the impact of Hindu nationalism are addressed. (In terms of style, her latest effort turns away from A Night of Knowing Nothing‘s monochrome videography.) This is a revival of a time-honored story: poor people move to the big city where they struggle to make a decent living. Here, the move is complicated by the protagonists having to learn a new language: the nurses’ native language is Malayalam, but to get by in Mumbai they need to speak Hindi.

Kapadia shot parts of All We Imagine As Light with a small camera, sneaking into public spaces without permission. When challenged, she pretended to be a location scout rather than a professional filmmaker. This approach lends a documentary flavor to the story’s scenes in Mumbai: the camera drifts among the boisterous nighttime crowds. When the film heads to the countryside, its images are even more sensual, though the atmosphere is more haphazard. For example, crabs might wander into one’s house. The film’s attention to sound design and music is also as exacting as its visuals — a piano interlude, composed and performed by Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Gebrou, is repeated throughout.

In its final half hour, the narrative takes a dip toward magic realism, reimagining the story of Prabha and her husband. But the presence of fantasy had been intimated early on, in stylized scenes located in Mumbai. For example, the blue shade of the nurses’ uniforms is reproduced all over the city. With mounting grace, All We Imagine As Light illuminates the dramas, large and small, of its resilient protagonists.

Steve Erickson writes about film and music for Gay City News, Slant Magazine, the Nashville Scene, Trouser Press, and other outlets. He also produces electronic music under the tag callinamagician. His latest album, Bells and Whistles, was released in January 2024, and is available to stream here.