All We Imagine as Light: The story of Indian brotherhood receives rave reviews at Cannes

Indian filmmaker Payal Kapadia’s new film opens with street scenes from contemporary Mumbai.

But All We Imagine as Light doesn’t show us the rich, elitist Mumbai of Bollywood stars and billionaire industrialists. Instead, the filmmaker superimposes onto street footage the voices of real immigrants from Mumbai, who are the heart of the city.

This is Kapadia’s first narrative feature film and it premiered Thursday evening in the main competition section of the Cannes Film Festival. The film received an eight-minute standing ovation.

It is an important success for the filmmaker, but also for India. This is the first time in 30 years that an Indian film has been presented in the main section of the Cannes competition. Kapadia, 38, shares the spotlight and the chance to win one of the festival’s prestigious prizes with Francis Ford Coppola, Yorgos Lanthimos, Ali Abbasi, Jacques Audiard and Jia Zhangke.

Over the past four decades, Indian films have done quite well on the global festival circuit.

Mira Nair’s Salaam Bombay won the Caméra d’Or at the 1988 Cannes Film Festival. Days before the September 11 terrorist attacks, Nair’s 2001 classic Monsoon Wedding won the Golden Lion at the Film Festival of Venice.

Director Ritesh Batra’s famous 2013 film The Lunchbox won the Grand Golden Rail Award at Cannes. And earlier this year, director Shuchi Talati’s Girls Will Be Girls won the Grand Jury and Audience Prize at the Sundance Film Festival.

But the possibility of a Palme d’Or or one of Cannes’ other key prizes has so far eluded India – the world’s largest film-producing country. This year, thanks to Kapadia’s moving and beautifully directed film, India has a good chance of winning.

The reviews are already very positive. The Guardian, in its five-star review, describes it as “glorious…a gripping story full of humanity.” The review puts the film on par with Satyajit Ray’s Mahanagar (The Big City) and Satyajit Ray’s Aranyer Din Ratri (Days and Nights in the Forest). And IndieWire, in its A-grade review, claims that Kapadia’s drama gives Mumbai a romantic look, as evidenced by the way “people occupy their space…whether alone or sharing.”

Daughter of the famous Indian artist Nalini Malani, Kapadia is very familiar with Mumbai, a multicultural and diverse city.

“It’s also a place where it’s a little easier for women to work than in many other places in the country,” Kapadia says.

“I wanted to make a film about women who leave their homes to work elsewhere.”

In All We Know as Light, Kapadia traces the lives and struggles of two Indian nurses from the southern state of Kerala, working in a hospital and living together in a small, cluttered apartment in Mumbai.

A nurse – Prabha (Kani Kusruti, who played a supporting role in Girls Will Be Girls) – is married. Her husband now works in Germany and almost never communicates with her. But suddenly she receives a surprise gift from her husband: a rice cooker. She hugs the machine, as if it were the last sign of love in her marriage.

The second nurse, Anu (Divya Prabha), is more adventurous and has a secret romance with a young Muslim Shiaz (a charming young actor, Hridhu Haroon) also from Kerala.

Anu is Hindu and her family would not approve of her relationship with Shiaz.

Mumbai’s crowded environment, with 22 million residents clamoring for space and the harsh monsoon season, do not allow Anu and Shiaz to have any privacy.

But suddenly, a third nurse from their hospital – Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam, starring in two films at Cannes this year) – decides to leave the city, forced by the redevelopment of a slum for the city’s rich.

Could this be an opportunity to change the course of these characters’ lives?

The politics of negotiating space are no different from the student struggles that Kapadia captured in his latest film – a documentary called A Night of Knowing Nothing.

The film was previewed in the parallel section of the Directors’ Fortnight at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival. It won the Œil d’or “Golden Eye”, the festival’s highest documentary prize.

A Night of Knowing Nothing followed the 2015 student strike at the prestigious government-run Film and Television Institute of India. Kapadia was part of the strike and eventually graduated with a degree in leadership from the institute in 2018.

In a 2022 interview, she described the documentary as a “love letter to public universities and what they represent – ​​a place where ideally people from all walks of life can be together and enjoy freedom, both intellectual and physical.”

A similar sentiment resonates in All We Imagine as Light.