93% META CRITIC – UNIVERSAL ACCLAIM – 100% ROTTEN TOMATOES

WINNER – GRAND PRIX – CANNES FILM FESTIVAL

The light, the lives, and the textures of contemporary, working-class Mumbai are explored and celebrated by writer/director Payal Kapadia, who won the Grand Prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival for her revelatory fiction feature debut. Centering on two roommates who also work together in a city hospital—head nurse Prabha (Kani Kusruti) and recent hire Anu (Divya Prabha)—plus their coworker, cook Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam), Kapadia’s film alights on moments of connection and heartache, hope and disappointment. Prabha, her husband from an arranged marriage living in faraway Germany, is courted by a doctor at her hospital; Anu carries on a romance with a Muslim man, which she must keep a secret from her strict Hindu family; Parvaty finds herself dealing with a sudden eviction from her apartment. Kapadia captures the bustle of the metropolis and the open-air tranquility of a seaside village with equal radiance, articulated by her superb actresses and by the camera with a lyrical naturalism that occasionally drifts into dreamlike incandescence. All We Imagine as Light is a soulful study of the transformative power of friendship and sisterhood, in all its complexities and richness.

“(A) Standout.  (A) delicately observed, stirring drama about three women living in Mumbai.” Manohla Dargis, The New York Times

“So delicately felt and sensuously textured…Cause for outright celebration. with a quiet truthfulness that, like the glittering lights of the city, lingers expansively in the memory.”  Justin Chang, The New Yorker

“One of the best films overall of the Cannes Film Festival.  A soulful character drama set in and around Mumbai. It’s an intimate film that whispers volumes about far bigger things.  I’d hope it will become the rare Indian film in the Oscar conversation in the coming months.”  David Canfield, Vanity Fair

“*****!  A GLORIOUS FILM.  There is a freshness and emotional clarity, an enriching humanity and gentleness which coexist with fervent, languorous eroticism and finally something epiphanic in the later scenes and mysterious final moments. It is so fluent and absorbing.”  Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian