OFFICIAL SELECTION – IN COMPETITION
Two days before the closing ceremony, All We Imagine as Light automatically wins a prize of hearts, that of the most beautiful title in the Cannes selection: “everything that we imagine as being light”, here, condensed in a few words, is a perfectly effective definition of cinema as a dazzling dream . In fact, Payal Kapadia, the new voice of Indian cinema, did not take long to rise to the competition, where she is, this year, at 38, one of the youngest recruits.
His previous film, All night without knowing, a black and white film essay in which a student uprising was described through the sound potion of love letters, had made a strong impression in the ranks of the Directors’ Fortnight, in 2021, and received the Golden Eye, which rewards a documentary each year. Her second feature film shifts to fiction, but a fiction steeped in the teeming reality of Bombay, the director’s hometown, just as her documentary was previously steeped in dreams.
The film opens with views of the city, a tracking shot on a street lined with stalls, an early market morning with, in the sound, bursts of inner voices, those of the consciousnesses colliding in the large centrifuge of the cited and express their uprooting. Soon, silhouettes become clearer, which become characters. Women who work as nurses in the hospital, and wear the sari characteristic of their profession, a shade of blue, like the cerulean halo that extends over the city during the monsoon.
Instant bursts of beauty
Prabha (Kani Kusruti), head nurse, shares an apartment with her colleague and younger sister Anu (Divya Prabha), both from Kerala, in southwest India. The first froths her loneliness, married too young to a complete stranger who left to work in Germany the day after the wedding. Her roommate has a secret romance with a young Muslim man, due to religious disparity, reduced to furtive interviews, in the absence of a place to make love. Overcoming spleen and frustration, they both go to lend a hand to a friend, their eldest, Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam), widow and last tenant of a building being demolished.
All We Imagine as Light circulates between these three women of different ages and conditions, three mirrored women, caught in the movement of the big city, between days at work, returns home, transport escapades and meetings. What begins to resonate from one to the other is a vexed relationship with men, who all have the particularity of being conspicuously absent, elsewhere rather than with them – fled, dead, or simply inaccessible. Hindered love reveals inextricable social determinisms for each person: the weight of traditions, arranged marriages, the family burden weighing on women, the insurmountable divisions of class society, etc.
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