The lives of three women nurses are front and centre in Payal Kapadia’s luminous Mumbai-set drama. Prabha (Kani Kusruti) works long hours to avoid thinking about her husband, who left for Germany long ago and eventually stopped calling. Her younger roommate, Anu (Divya Prabha), spends her evenings with her Muslim boyfriend while dodging calls from her parents, who are looking to set her up with a Hindi husband. Meanwhile, Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam), an older widow, is being pushed out of her home by greedy property developers.
Winner of the Grand Prix at this year’s Cannes Film Festival (a historic first for an Indian film), All We Imagine as Light derives considerable power from its steady accumulation of quotidian detail. As a minor character puts it in a line of poetry, “My dreams are made of everyday things.” A moving portrait of resistance and camaraderie, it is a film that finds beauty and solace in the unlikeliest of places.
Grand Prix, Cannes 2024
Supported by
Media Partner
Kani Kusruti, Divya Prabha, Chhaya Kadam, Hridhu Haroon, Azees Nedumangad
France/India/Netherlands/
Luxembourg
2024
In Malayalam and Hindi with English subtitles
Book Tickets
Indigenous & Community Access
Indigenous Access Tickets Community Access Tickets Ticket Donation Requests
Credits & Director
Executive Producer
Harshit Agarwal, K. C. Pranav Raj, Neil Chowdhury
Producer
Thomas Hakim, Julien Graff
Screenwriter
Payal Kapadia
Cinematography
Ranabir Das
Editor
Clément Pinteaux
Production Design
Piyusha Chalke, Yashasvi Sabharwal, Shamim Khan
Original Music
Dhritiman Das
Payal Kapadia
Payal Kapadia is a Mumbai-based filmmaker. She studied film direction at the Film & Television Institute of India. Her short films Afternoon Clouds (2017) and And What Is The Summer Saying (2018) premiered respectively at Cannes and the Berlinale. Her first feature film, A Night of Knowing Nothing (2021), premiered at the Directors’ Fortnight where it won the Golden Eye for Best Documentary.
Filmography: A Night of Knowing Nothing (2021)
Photo by Ranabir Das
Missing VIFF? Check out what's playing at the VIFF Centre
Hockney
An engaging, insightful and inspiring film portrait of the late great British and California artist. He’s one of the most accessible figurative painters of the last half century, but look closer, there’s much more to David Hockney than meets the eye.
Peter Asher: Everywhere Man
A chart topping pop star as one half of Peter and Gordon, Peter Asher was brother to Jane, brother in law to Paul McCartney, ran the Beatles' Apple, produced and managed James Taylor, Linda Ronstadt, and 10,000 Maniacs, to name just a few. He did it all.
Democracy Under Siege
As the USA turns 250, Oscar-nominated director Laura Nix considers the roots of the current political crisis with commentary from historian Heather Cox Richardson, progressive politician Jamie Raskin, and cartoonist Ann Telnaes, among others.
Malcolm X
In an indelible role, Denzel Washington give us a layered, compassionate, conflicted man who finds the strength in Islam to transcend his demons and confront the inequity and racism in America head-on. Along with Do the Right Thing, this is Spike Lee's greatest film.