London Film Festival 2024 – All We Imagine As Light ★★★★

Released: 29th November 2024

Director: Payal Kapadia

Starring: Kani Kusruti, Divya Prabha, Chhaya Kadam, Hridhu Haroon, Azees Nedumangad

Coming off the back of winning the Grand Prix at Cannes Film Festival, Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine As Light beautifully captures the luminous, metaphysical wonders of love and empty loneliness in an Indian metropolis, Mumbai, following three different women on their journeys through their individual and shared experiences. Kapadia’s gorgeously subtle and auteurist foundations can be found in her directorial debut, A Night of Knowing Nothing, a sort of Chantal Akerman-esque pseudo-documentary coalescing love, academia and student revolt in harmony. Kapadia’s wonderfully transparent understanding of love and suffering due to love are the template for All We Imagine As Light.

Married nurse, Prabha, played astonishingly well by Kani Kusruti, has her routine muddled and sent sideways when she receives a package form her estranged husband, who now lives in Germany. Anu (Divya Prabha), her younger roommate, who is training to become a nurse, is constantly trailing around the city, looking for secret spots for her and her Muslim boyfriend, Shiaz, to drift, talk and kiss their way through the city. Then there is the omniscient and older Parvaty, beautifully played by Chhaya Kadam, whose home is threatened to be demolished by the landlord causing her to move back home to her seaside village.

Kapadia, interweaves these three individuals and their own narratives with tremendous humanism and a complete understanding of her subjects. Photographed digitally and lensed ridiculously well by collaborator Ranabir Das, there is a categoric tactility and feel to all of Kapadia’s work. Taking place during the Monsoon season, Mumbai remains bustling and busy, further isolating its individuals. Tower blocks, lights, wind, clothes are all shot with this ineffable sense of location. Kapadia’s audiovisual mastery and form is beyond most directors who are only two films in. Her editing, in collaboration with Clement Pinteaux and Jeanne Sarfati, is some of the best of this year’s catalogue of filmic work, lingering and sitting in moments of pain, love and joy that is akin to an Apichatpong Weerasethakul picture.

Not only do the lives of these three women become overlayed within the narrative, but so does dialect and language. The three languages, Hindi, Malayalam and Marathi are seamlessly utilised, amplifying Payal’s desire for language, poetry and words. Kapadia’s rumination on love through voiceovers and poems plays perfectly into the film’s narrative. Anu sends “kisses through the clouds” to Shiaz as we cut to jaw-dropping photography of the Mumbai sky, is only a fragment of what All We Imagine As Light has to offer its spectator.

Already offering its spectator a miraculous, human experience. When All We Imagine As Light steeps slightly into the world of magical realism during its finale, it feels like it falls slightly short of genius. Where, A Night of Knowing Nothing, maintains this tasteful, coalesced approach for its entire runtime, once this magical realism comes into play by the finale it feels out of place and unnecessary. The film is magical enough in its portrayal of human lives without the need to push those boundaries any further.

Payal Kapadia is a force to be reckoned with, her work is nothing short of genius. All We Imagine As Light, alongside Dea Kulumbegashvili’s April are easily some of the most astonishing pieces of work at this year’s London Film Festival. It is without question that the future oeuvre of Payal Kapadia will be an entrancing and masterful collection of human tales and experiences.