All We Imagine as Light

It takes an awful lot of skill to make cinema feel this effortless.

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.

The drama is strange and enthralling, and concludes with a final shot that holds and holds and holds and holds and holds on a potent portrait of joy and pain and longing that you won’t soon forget.

Kapadia captures, with the help of her engaging cast, the spectrum of attitudes of women in this beautiful country, striving to build a small piece of happiness amid the economic, religious and patriarchal limitations placed on them.

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.