In Mumbai, if you want to be moved, you take the train. Hence in Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine as Light, which portrays public transportation as the height of romance and poetry, a nurse, Prabha (Kani Kusruti), takes lengthy commutes that involve staring at dazzling landscapes that glisten under the moonlight. On station platforms, trains flash past to create blurry, cinematic backdrops; from Prabha’s home, a railway line is visible from her bedroom window, the carriages resembling fireflies when spied from a distance. Moreover, there’s Anu (Divya Prabha), a fellow nurse for whom the overcrowding on trains allows her to hold on tightly to her secret boyfriend.
At the BFI’s office in September, Kapadia is drawing me a diagram on a piece of paper to illustrate how Mumbai is a “long city” that requires travelling up and down, but rarely from side to side. “You spend a lot of time on trains to get anywhere,” says the 38-year-old Indian filmmaker who wrote and directed All We Imagine as Light. “Half our time is spent going up and down, up and down, up and down.”
What’s the secret to making trains so cinematic? “Trains are cinematic,” Kapadia exclaims. “They’re like little film strips.” She imitates the whirring noise of celluloid, then enthuses about the Tube in London. She senses my own disagreement. “You don’t think the subway here is cinematic? It’s incredibly cinematic to see different kinds of people, and how they take a nap.” She pauses to note the sound of women cheering from another room. “For me, everything in daily life is more interesting when you’re making films, or when you’re in love.”
In All We Imagine as Light, though, Prabha and her younger colleague Anu navigate romance from unfortunate angles. While Prabha is married, her husband lives in Germany and they haven’t communicated in months. Meanwhile, Anu’s boyfriend, Shiaz (Hridhu Haroon), is Muslim, which means that she must hide him from her relatives. A bond that unexpectedly forms, then, is between Prabha, Anu, and a third woman, Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam,) a cook in the hospital who’s facing eviction.
“When you move to a city, not just Mumbai, it tends to be your friends who take care of you,” says Kapadia. “In cities, friends become the family you make.” She remarks disappointedly that in South Asian cultures, women are regularly pitted against each other. “I wanted an enriching film where friends are supportive. It’s like your actual family can’t understand you, but your friends can. When Anu brings her boyfriend to meet her friends, it’s like how you might take somebody home to your family and you want their approval.”
Kapadia started writing the script when she was 31 and closer to the age of Anu. “I’ve changed in the years,” she says. “In the beginning, I didn’t like people like Prabha, but as I’ve grown older, I have empathy for her.” At first, the role of Anu was intended for Kusruti as Kapadia was such a fan of a 2016 short, Memories of a Machine. However, the funding process took so long that Kusruti, a 39-year-old Indian actor who also starred in this year’s Girls Will Be Girls, was recast as the more age-appropriate Prabha.
Mumbai is a city where you can’t find privacy unless you have money. And because they don’t have it, the city becomes their place of love and union – Payal Kapadia
“I was trying to understand why Payal wanted to make a film in Malayalam, which isn’t her language,” Kusruti tells me in Sea Containers Hotel during the London Film Festival. “But then I understood slowly why.” Like many nurses in Mumbai, Prabha and Anu are from Kerala and thus speak Malayalam for much of the film. In turn, Kapadia required a translator for the Malayalam dialogue. “In India, we speak so many languages,” says Kusruti. “When we meet each other, we mostly speak English because we don’t share the same language.”
After confirming to me an online nugget I found – “kusruti” is the Malayalam word for “mischief”, which she chose for her surname at the age of 15 – Kusruti describes her preparation for the film as being atypical. “Actors tend to get obsessed with their character,” she says. “But Payal had seen the whole film already. In rehearsals, I had to find the aesthetics of the film, and put my character into that world.” While Kusruti was shown videos of real nurses, she was instructed not to imitate their physicality. “The CPR I’m doing is slow and not realistic. Payal wanted a different rhythm. She said the film was going to be dreamy.”
For Kusruti, All We Imagine as Light depicts female friendship but covers more sociopolitical terrain, namely how these women are overworked and underpaid to just about eke out an existence away from their hometown. “It’s about these migrant labourers of a different class coming together in a city for different jobs,” she says. “Some are falling apart because the systems aren’t helping them, or they’re not able to adapt into this new culture.” It’s worth noting that Kusruti is politically minded: at Cannes, she wore a watermelon clutch to signify support for Palestine. “It can feel weird to celebrate at this time in the world,” the actor says. “That was a platform to show solidarity.”
Kapadia, too, has a history of speaking truth to power. In 2015, she led a 139-day student protest against the Film and Television Institute of India over the appointment of a right-wing figurehead, Gajendra Chauhan, as their new chairperson. “But the core of the protests was about making public universities affordable for everybody,” Kapadia clarifies. “We should be fighting for affordable public education.” Her 2021 feature, A Night of Knowing Nothing, takes a wider look at the student protests. “My previous film was really angry and nobody watched it,” Kapadia says, laughing. “I tried to be less angry this time.”
Whereas A Night of Knowing Nothing was in monochrome, All We Imagine as Light is a vivid, trancelike explosion of colours that are accompanied by a musical score largely comprising Ethiopian jazz. In the first half, Mumbai’s humid, rainy monsoon season is presented in what Kapadia denotes as “weird, blue, grey-ish, woozy” shades that envelop the nurses whose uniforms match their surroundings. In the second half, the three women visit Ratnagiri, a coastal village with green trees, red rocks, yellow sand, and the light blueness of clear skies above the Arabian Sea. “In fiction, you can be really precise,” says Kapadia. “You can have 50 types of purple, and they all mean something different.”
Even though All We Imagine as Light won the Grand Prix at Cannes, it wasn’t selected by India as their Oscar entry (likely for political reasons), nor was it picked by France (two of the film’s producers are French, but France selected Emilia Pérez instead). Kapadia, though, shrugs and claims the financing process was so arduous that anything beyond the film’s existence is a bonus. It is, after all, one of the most acclaimed films of recent memory, and deservedly so. As with I Saw the TV Glow and Nickel Boys, two other highlights of 2024, All We Imagine as Light is a lyrical, expressive drama that weaves in and out of scenes in a truly thrilling manner. I note that Kapadia, in our conversation, repeatedly refers to how the rhythm recreates the feeling of being in love.
“Mumbai, when you’re in love, it feels nicer,” explains Kapadia. “You go outside, explore the place, and eat kebabs. Anu can’t take Shiaz home, and Shiaz can’t take Anu home. If you don’t have money, you can’t keep going to restaurants, so you walk around and find something to do. You have nowhere to kiss, so you hide behind bushes – with other couples who are also there. Then when it rains, you’re screwed.
“These things are very specific to Mumbai, because it’s a city where you can’t find privacy unless you have money. And because they don’t have it, the city becomes their place of love and union.” With a laugh, she adds, “A couple hanging out, or trying to find a place to have sex – it’s a theme in many films. It’s a bit sad that over so many years, it’s the same concerns we have.”
All We Imagine as Light is out in UK cinemas on November 29
