Blue nights, loneliness and longing in ‘All We Imagine as Light’

There is a certain feeling that comes from wandering a city alone after dark. There is a sense of life tucked away, of connection hidden behind closed doors, of possibilities just out of reach. The lights stretch across the city with a vibrant insistence, filtered through smoke and rain and the shapes of people. There is a steady undercurrent of metropolitan noise and, in Mumbai during monsoon season, the city becomes tinged blue as plastic tarpaulin covers the streets.

This is the atmosphere that backdrops Payal Kapadia’s second feature film, All We Imagine as Light. Recently topping Sight and Sound’s list of the top 50 films of 2024, the film has been met with great amounts of acclaim. It won the Grand Prix at Cannes earlier this year and was the first Indian film in 30 years to be part of the festival’s main competition section.

Conceptualizing urban loneliness, longing and possibility, All We Imagine as Light follows the lives of three women living and working in Mumbai. Two of the women work as nurses, and the other as a hospital cook. Each of the women come from different generations, but all three are connected by a sense of loss and uncertainty. Anu (Divya Prabha), one of the nurses, yearns for her lover, a Muslim man alienated by her community. Prabha (Kani Kusruti), the other nurse, longs for her husband who is a continent away, while Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam), the cook, widowed and living alone, faces inevitable displacement from her home due to incoming housing developments.

Kapadia’s tenacity for realism imbues the film with a documentarian’s eye

Beginning the film, a montage of the city, beautifully shot in dreamy light, accompanies a series of voiceovers from different inhabitants speaking to and about Mumbai. We see the nocturnal streets with market stalls and commuters travelling home on packed trains. Immediately, the daily urban life depicted in All We Imagine as Light feels palpable. Kapadia’s tenacity for realism imbues the film with a documentarian’s eye. The named characters are grounded in the wider fabric of Mumbai’s worker society before we follow their individual narrative perspectives. In this way, the urban backdrop of the film feels truly concentrated and alive. It lives and breathes alongside the characters.

The narrative has a loose quality to it – showcasing Kapadia’s past work as a documentary filmmaker – and yet, at the same time, it feels exquisitely crafted. During the film’s Cannes press conference, Kapadia commented on the lengthy and collaborative process she underwent with the actors in making the film: not being fluent in the film’s language (Malayalam), each scene involved much rehearsal and what Kapadia described as a ‘workshop situation’ with her associate director and co-dialogue writer. Ensuring that the translation of every single word of dialogue was perfect, this rigorous approach sees every rhythm and cadence of speech capturing the essence of the meaning Kapadia wanted to put across. No word spoken in the film feels arbitrary. Balancing out this methodical way of working, All We Imagine as Light is also made up of more organic filming processes. In one scene, which follows Anu and her lover around Mumbai’s night markets, the actors roamed around uninstructed. Kapadia commented on the documentary-esque shooting of this scene, describing how the actors improvised, speaking whatever came to them in a matter more akin to non-fiction.

Kapadia’s harmonious blending of directorial precision and organicity is reflected in the look of the film

Working closely with her partner and cinematographer, Ranabir Das, Kapadia’s harmonious blending of directorial precision and organicity is reflected in the look of the film. All We Imagine as Light contains the kind of gorgeously lit images that could easily teeter into a feeling of contrivance and artificiality, yet they always manage to match the reality the film depicts. For a narrative so focused on metropolitan life, which finds macro social commentary in the experiences of the three women’s micro existences, the ability to capture the essence of a city is essential. All We Imagine as Light never struggles to do this – no scene feels too grand or too small. They all flow seamlessly.

In the latter half of the film, all the tugs and pulls of the women’s circumstances take them to Ratnagiri (a coastal district many workers migrate to Mumbai from). Here, there is a noticeable shift in feeling. Where city lights held an aching sense of melancholy, the coast sees light in new forms. The women’s daytime hours no longer fill themselves with hospital work. The time to reflect on their fragile or lost loves is no longer confined to the blue hours of the night. The film’s movement away from Mumbai, reversing the line of internal worker migration, allows the women’s simmering desires to finally meet daylight. Daylight emerges to reflect alternative possibilities to the monotony of the city: hope, sisterhood, the potential of the future.

Their longing is intense – a feeling that all the actors in the film portray masterfully, as if it is something embedded in each of their beings

There is a moment in Ratnagiri where Anu and her lover, now out of the confines of Mumbai, are searching for a place to make love. Their longing is intense – a feeling that all the actors in the film portray masterfully, as if it is something embedded in each of their beings. Later they come across a cave and gaze at ancient carvings on its walls with a smartphone light. At a standstill, one carving of a woman strikes something deep within Anu and she says, “it’s like she has been stuck here forever, as if she has been waiting for something to happen.” Her lover replies, “she looks like you.”

In a similar moment, Prabha sits by a window in her apartment, rain pattering outside, and reads a poem – given to her by a romantically-interested male doctor – by the light of her smart-phone. When she receives a rice cooker in the mail from her husband in Germany she cradles it, desperately torn between a new, blooming intimacy and the loneliness of waiting for a man who is unreachable. Parvaty, too, passes through days in a state of dissatisfaction, telling Prabha before leaving her home in Mumbai that they are “both meant to be alone.”

Kapadia seems to posit loneliness and longing as fateful symptoms of womanhood in the precarity of metropolitan India. All We Imagine as Light is composed of moments like these, poetically strung together to create a lyrical portrait of a city and the lives of its inhabitants. Moments of stark, emotional intensity are found among urban monotony, in blue nights. Kapadia may imagine the future as insecure, but makes an assurance that connection is possible and what lies at the end of waiting can eventually be found. Hope’s presence is often murky, but it is always waiting to be uncovered, insistently sneaking into the lives and imaginations of Anu, Prabha and Parvaty.