All We Imagine as Light

Part of my coverage of the 60th Chicago International Film Festival

ALL WE IMAGINE AS LIGHT   ***

Payal Kapadia

2024

IDEA:  Three female nurses and friends in Mumbai navigate life in the city.

BLURB:  Against a seemingly perpetual night sky, immersed in a constant din of car horns, screeching railway tracks, rain, and crowd chatter, the illuminated windows of towers create a mosaic of golden light. This is the Mumbai of All We Imagine as Light, at once a vibrant urban hub and a pointillist abstraction where, we are told, one must become used to impermanence. After introducing life in the city via the pointedly polyglot testimonies of some of its residents, Kapadia homes in on three in particular, all nurses who are constrained in some way by being working-class women in a prescriptive, unequal Indian society. All We Imagine as Light fleshes out the women’s circumstances in a humanistic social-realist register akin to Satyajit Ray or Ritwik Ghatak, avoiding miserabilist sensationalism in favor of a hushed, empathic observation that might befit the work of one of the nurses. Within the tireless bustle of Mumbai, the women toil, yearn, mourn, laugh, rage, and love; they quietly push against sociocultural dictates, but mostly live as they can within the contradictions and vexations of the city they call home. The strong sense of claustrophobia Kapadia creates in the urban first part of the film is powerfully alleviated when she transitions from the darkness of Mumbai to the sun-filled vistas of an Indian coastal village. There, in an affective psycho-geographical shift that recalls, yes, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, the women find a space that permits them to answer to their own desires. Meandering and muted, perhaps to a fault, All We Imagine as Light eventually drifts into a place of quiet transcendence for all three women, a found family united under another night sky.