There is a point in the slow moving yet deeply moving Indian film All We Imagine as Light, a moment which will go unspecified, when a fantasy/dream sensibility suddenly takes the floor. After we have settled into the erstwhile, realism-based narrative, about the lives of three women working in a Mumbai hospital — a dollop of surrealism both surprises and enriches our understanding.
Dreams can be like that. So can sentient cinema, an art form often driven by the twin engines of dreams and storyboarded reality.
In a story of urban pressures and struggles of the not-necessarily-upwardly mobile women characters, we might expect some rough edges in the picture. But writer-director Payal Kapadia opts for a more soft-edged, soulful, and subtle approach. She has created something unique here, clearly belonging on the index of most notable cinematic achievements of 2024. With this, her first fiction feature (after 2021’s acclaimed documentary A Night of Knowing Nothing), Kapadia became the first Indian woman to win a coveted prize at the Cannes Film Festival, the Grand Prix.