150 Word Review: 'All We Imagine As Light' (2024)
City of dreams
The bustling, chaotic, multi-cultural city of Mumbai is a supporting character in writer/director Payal Kapadia's All We Imagine As Light. It's a crowded metropolis where opposites collide: poverty and plenty, hope and despair. This is an intimate drama about quiet moments between people in a loud place: Prabha and Anu share a cramped one-bedroom apartment at night and work as nurses at a large hospital during the day. They are both brokenhearted in different ways—Prabha's husband ran away to Germany, and Anu fell in love with a young Muslim man. Developers force their friend Parvathy to return to the small village of her birth, and the pair help her move. Kani Kusruti's Pabha is prickly and vulnerable; Divya Prabha's Anu is defiant. She will love who she wants. Kapadia's camera dwells on her characters' faces and lets their soulful eyes tell stories of longing, wanting, and fierce dreams.