Watch 'All We Imagine as Light' director Payal Kapadia visit the Criterion Closet in a new video.

NEW YORK (AP) — Fiction moves stealthily through Payal Kapadia’s films.The Indian filmmaker’s first movie, “Night of Knowing Nothing,” is a documentary about the student strike at the Film and Television Institute of India, Kapadia’s alma mater, following the appointment by Prime Minister Narendra Modi of a right-wing chairman. The film, though, is threaded through with fictional letters between two students who have split because they belong to separate castes.Kapadia’s first fully narrative film, “All We Imagine as Light,” begins more like a documentary, surveying Mumbai, particularly at night, before gently gravitating toward three women, all of them hospital workers, who are juggling their workaday realities, and those of India’s stratified society, with their own aspirations.“Real life is more interesting than cinema can be. We just have to pick its fruits,” Kapadia says, smiling. “There’s a quote from Rilke that I really love: ‘If your real life is poor, it means you are not poet enough to draw from its…

Payal Kapadia's “All We Imagine as Light" is about as rich a movie experience as you’ll find this year.