‘All We Imagine as Light’ Trailer: Payal Kapadia’s Luminous Cannes Winner Is One of the Year’s Best

The Indian feature won the Grand Prix at Cannes before screening at Telluride, Toronto, and New York.

Payal Kapadia‘s critically acclaimed narrative debut, “All We Imagine as Light,” spotlights the close community of women within the intergenerational nursing realm.

Kapadia, who previously directed Cannes’ Golden Eye award-winning documentary “A Night of Knowing Nothing” in 2021, has been working on “All We Imagine as Light” since film school. The feature was the first Indian film to premiere in competition at the Cannes Film Festival in 30 years, and later won the Grand Prize at the festival.

Here’s the official synopsis: “Centering on two roommates who also work together in a city hospital —head nurse Prabha (Kani Kusruti) and recent hire Anu (Divya Prabha), plus their coworker, cook Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam) — Kapadia’s film alights on moments of connection and heartache, hope and disappointment. Prabha, her husband from an arranged marriage living in faraway Germany, is courted by a doctor at her hospital; Anu carries on a romance with a Muslim man, which she must keep a secret from her strict Hindu family; Parvaty finds herself dealing with a sudden eviction from her apartment. Kapadia captures the bustle of the metropolis and the open-air tranquility of a seaside village with equal radiance, articulated by her superb actresses and by the camera with a lyrical naturalism that occasionally drifts into dreamlike incandescence.”

“For me, it was normal to have a film where there were so many female characters,” Kapadia recently told IndieWire. “I feel something strongly towards the female friendship and the sort of companionship that has helped me a lot in my life. So it was something that I felt affectionate towards, but it’s also complicated and never easy. I was interested in these different layers of femininity in the country. The film starts with a very old woman and ends with a very young girl who has short hair and could be confused to be a boy. And all these women could be at different times the same person.”

The film had its North American premiere at the Telluride Film Festival and later screened at the Toronto International Film Festival and New York Film Festival. “All We Imagine as Light” was snubbed by India for its Oscar submission; despite being on the shortlist for France, the country submitted “Emilia Pérez” instead.

“All We Imagine as Light” premieres November 15 in theaters from Sideshow/Janus Films. Check out the trailer below.