A luminous slice of Mumbai life in ‘All We Imagine as Light’

Fiction moves stealthily through Payal Kapadia’s films. The Indian filmmaker’s first movie, “Night of Knowing Nothing,” is a documentary about the student strike at the Film and Television Institute of India, Kapadia’s alma mater. The film, though, is threaded through with fictional letters between two students who have split because they belong to separate castes. Kapadia’s first fully narrative film, “All We Imagine as Light,” begins more like a documentary, surveying Mumbai, particularly at night, before gently gravitating toward three women, all of them hospital workers, who are juggling their workaday realities, and those of India’s stratified society, with their own aspirations.

“Real life is more interesting than cinema can be. We just have to pick its fruits,” Kapadia says, smiling. “There’s a quote from Rilke that I really love: ‘If your real life is poor, it means you are not poet enough to draw from its riches.’”

“All We Imagine as Light,” which opened on Friday in theatres and expands in the coming weeks, is about as rich a movie experience as you’ll find this year. The film, which won the Grand Prix (second prize) at the Cannes Film Festival, is an intoxicatingly atmospheric portrait of life in Mumbai — of its dreams, its illusions and its impossibilities.

As “All We Imagine as Light” moves along, it slowly accumulates the magic of fable. Prabha (Kani Kusruti) hasn’t heard from her husband, who’s working in Germany, in years. Anu (Divya Prabha) is in love with a Muslim man, a relationship they have to hide and that, probably, is doomed. Their slightly older, recently widowed colleague, Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam), is being evicted after many years in her apartment.

But when they escape the city — Parvaty is forced to move back to her village — the three women shed the various constrictions that grip them. They begin to imagine possibilities and see a light hidden to them by the patriarchal inequalities of Mumbai. “All We Imagine as Light,” begun in documentary, turns increasingly fictional, and yet truer.

“I wanted to get closer and closer to a dreamlike state toward the end of the film and then snap back to reality,” Kapadia says. “I wanted the first part of the film to be very kind of nonfiction, with a documentary beginning. And the second half to feel as if time slows down. The landscape changes and the feeling of light changes.”

The luminous phases of “All We Imagine as Light” has made it one of the most acclaimed films of the year — and yet, curiously, not India’s submission for best international film at the Academy Awards. In announcing its choice, Kiran Rao’s “Laapataa Ladies,” Ravi Kottarakara, president of the Film Federation of India, explained that the selection committee felt “that they were watching a European film taking place in India, not an Indian film taking place in India.”

“What is Indian? It’s a very big continent that we have. There’s a lot of Indias,” Kapadia said in a recent interview. “I’m really happy with the film they chose. It’s a really nice film. I liked it a lot. But I feel like these kind of statements, I don’t know what purpose they serve. The committee that made the selection was 13 men. Is that very Indian? Then I don’t mind so much.”

Kapadia, 38, met a reporter at the Criterion Collection offices in New York while “All We Imagine as Light” was playing at the New York Film Festival. Her bag was stuffed with DVDs from a visit to the Criterion closet, including an Agnes Varda box set. Kapadia will chat naturally about arthouse inspirations or social ills but she’s an ebullient, easy-going presence. That her film has inspired so much emotion (the festival press screening was the rare one where attendees burst into spontaneous applause at the end) is, for her, the thing that matters most.

“What else would you want as a filmmaker, that people watch it and like it and feel something when they watch it?” Kapadia says. “As somebody who loves to go to the cinema and cry — it’s for me the greatest catharsis I can have — I just feel I want to make films where people also cry in the cinema.”
Associated Press