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
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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
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