All We Imagine as Light

Director: Payal Kapadia

2024 / 110min / DCP

Winner of the Grand Prix at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival, Kapadia’s fiction feature debut concerns itself with the intimate, everyday concerns of Kani Kusruti and Divya Prabha as Prabha and Anu, roommates and co-workers at a Mumbai hospital, and their recently retired co-worker Parvaty, played by Chhaya Kadam, facing homelessness in the aftermath of an act of slum clearance. Formally and structurally audacious, in its rich color palette and its free movement between slice-of-life realism to transcendental mysticism, and throughout deeply humane.

“On some of the older cars in Mumbai’s local railway, the doors don’t close. This is how we meet Prabha, her hands on a pole, the wind in her hair, the city’s lights gently blurred behind her. Aboard the ladies compartment, there’s a sense of ease that she doesn’t find elsewhere in her life, in this crowded city. Among these other women, who chat, listen to music, or doze, she seems to notice just how good the air feels.” —Series curator Genevieve Yue

Distributor: Janus Films