ALL WE IMAGINE AS LIGHT U.S. Trailer: Payal Kapadia’s Cannes-Winning Drama Celebrates Friendship & Sisterhood
![Kani Kusruti and Divya Prabha in Payal Kapadia's ALL WE IMAGINE AS LIGHT](../../wp-content/uploads/2024/10/AllWeImagineAsLight_1.jpg)
One movie that has captured the hearts of critics and audiences on the festival circuit this year is writer-director Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine As Light. The drama, which won the Grand Prix at Cannes, follows a close community of working-class women in contemporary Mumbai dealing with love and heartache. It stars Kani Kusruti, Divya Prabha, and Chhaya Kadam. Kapadia, who previously directed the documentary A Night of Knowing Nothing, started working on the feature when she was in film school. It had its North American premiere at the Telluride Film Festival and more recently went on to screen at TIFF and NYFF.
The film was snubbed by India for its Oscar submission. Even though it was on France’s shortlist, the country submitted Emilia Pérez instead. But its chances of staying in the Oscars conversation may not be lost. In his editorial “Where the Women at in Best Picture?,” contributor Rendy Jones wrote “All We Imagine as Light [is] a lyrical romantic drama about loneliness and forbidden love in Mumbai. The two roommates, who might as well be sisters, are played beautifully by relatively unknown actors who may not do much campaigning… [The film] is being released by Sideshow and Janus Films. If given the strong fight they poured into Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car (2021), which wound up with 4 nominations, it will have the best chance of making it into the Best Picture category.
Here’s the official synopsis:
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.
All We Imagine As Light opens in theaters November 15. Watch the U.S. trailer below.