All We Imagine as Light

This is a very patient movie, filled with equally patient performances, lyrical camerawork and some stunning images of its characters residing within the frame. Kapadia’s screenplay builds fleshed out characters, even in the supporting roles.

In her first fiction feature, documentarian Payal Kapadia brings a poetic profundity to this 
cinematic spellbinder about female sisterhood in a big city (Mumbai) full of societal, economic and political pressures that can force out intimacy and dreams



This film plumbs the extraordinary emotions that hum and throb through ordinary life.

We’re well into the film when Kapadia delivers her biggest surprise, breaking one of conventional screenwriting’s cardinal rules by switching the setting and essentially dividing the film into two halves. What’s more, it works.

This is a film of moments that stay with you.

“All We Imagine as Light” is the kind of movie one experiences in solitude even when sharing it with others. As with dwellers in a great metropolis, it makes strangers and accomplices of us all.

Like the best movies of this kind, and this is one of the best movies of this kind, the film is not entirely starry-eyed about what its city is...

Settling into All We Imagine As Light‘s warm, generous gaze is easy — it’s leaving it that’s difficult.

All We Imagine as Light is a soothing balm amidst the chaotic rhythms of modern Mumbai, offering a gentle meditation on life's complexities.

Extraordinary for its mixture of harsh realism and ethereal beauty in depicting both the experience of women in India’s modern cities and the religious sectarianism that pervades the society.