Screen/Society--"All We Imagine as Light" (Payal Kapadia, 2024)
ALL WE IMAGINE AS LIGHT (Payal Kapadia, 2024, 118 min, France/India/Netherlands/Luxembourg, Malayalam and Hindi w/English subtitles, DCP)
In a vast, heaving Mumbai that bustles by day and glimmers by night, two nurses - roommates by chance - form a makeshift sisterhood. Proper, practical Prabha grieves her estranged marriage but holds her teeming desires (and an eager suitor) at bay; youthful, sensuous Anu cherishes secret text messages and steamy trysts with a Muslim boy. Meanwhile, a no-nonsense neighbor whose widowhood leaves her struggling to keep her flat recruits the two younger women to her village by the sea, where all three find unlikely refuge in the clarity of shared wanting, if not having.
-- Winner of the Grand Prix at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival
"Cause for celebration...so delicately felt and sensuously textured...with a quiet truthfulness that, like the glittering lights of the city, lingers expansively in the memory." - Justin Chang, The New Yorker
"There is a freshness and emotional clarity in [All We Imagine as Light], an enriching humanity and gentleness which coexist with fervent, languorous eroticism." - Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian
"Each shot by Ranabir Das in this gorgeous and absorbing film has been composed to have the skin-prickling effect of a photograph taken by someone with a deep and attentive care for their subject." - Sophie Monks Kaufman, IndieWire
"It's a film that feels like a long exhale, the moment of unburdening after a tight embrace. It's beautiful." - Clarisse Loughrey, Independent (UK)
