All We Imagine as Light

Payal Kapadia's fiction feature debut is an intimate snapshot of contemporary Mumbai that centers on two roommates working as nurses in a big city hospital. The upright middle-aged Prabha (Kani Kusruti) longs for her husband, who migrated to Germany for work after they got married. The younger, more carefree Anu (Divya Prabha) just wants to find a place in the city to be intimate with her Muslim boyfriend (Hridhu Haroon). Unable to find much fulfillment in the bustling, increasingly capitalistic city, they escape their romantic and emotional stasis by helping Prabha's friend Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam) move back to the coastal village of her youth. With dreamlike cinematography from Ranabir Das, Kapadia finds poetry in this simple story of everyday details.