this film won the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival!

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“Everything we imagine as light”, is how the title of the first feature-length fiction by Indian director Payal Kapadia can be translated.

This is already quite an invitation and, to say the least, a dizzying promise. All this is nothing compared to the film. The one who, for the moment, had only presented one documentary, awarded a Golden Eye for best documentary at Cannes in 2021, is making its majestic entrance into the world of fiction.

A fiction, really?

A fiction you said? On paper certainly, but in reality, Payal Kapadia paints here a totally baroque picture, for us Westerners, of a society that is certainly modern but archaic regarding the subjects of caste and religion. She illustrates her point through three characters, two nurses, Prabha and Anu, the first in her forties and the second around ten years her junior.

There is also Parvaty, a cook in the hospital that employs them. She is up against real estate developers who want to make her leave her home to seize the land and build ever bigger, ever higher. No one to defend her, the case will quickly be heard… Prabha is one of these women married without their consent. Her husband, as soon as the ceremony was over, left to work in Germany. Since then, no more news. Anu, the youngest of the trio, is single but constrained by her family because the boy she loves, Shiaz, is… Muslim. We will follow their journey first in Bombay, a megalopolis of nearly 22 million souls.

Clandestine love

The first part of the film is almost documentary. The director shows us her hometown in all its dimensions, its teeming, dizzying overpopulation, its poverty-stricken neighborhoods, its tiny interiors where entire families are crammed together. This is where we meet Prabha and Anu, living in shared accommodation. If the latter secretly pursues the perfect clandestine love with her Muslim beau, it is different for Prabha who, despite the prolonged absence of her husband, refuses the advances of a man madly in love with her, a doctor in her hospital. Finally, Parvaty gives up and decides to return to her native village, by the sea. Her two friends accompany her…

Grand Prix of the Cannes Film Festival

The lights (the film was shot during the monsoons), the colors (the blue of Bombay, the red of the lands which welcome the three women in the second part), the framing, come together to create moments of eternity which put you in true weightlessness (the scene in the cave is truly beautiful).

Kani Kusruti (Prabha) and Divya Prabha (Anu) are the two reflections of current Indian femininity caught between respect for castrating traditions and a powerful desire to experience true love. Special mention for the young Hridhu Haroon, Shiaz full of emotion, the antithesis of the virilist and macho clichés linked to his origins. This film received the Grand Prize at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival. See it without delay.

Robert PÉNAVAYRE

All we imagine as lighta film by Payal Kapadia

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