All We Imagine as Light (Prabhayay Ninachathellam) opens with shots of Mumbai during the morning rush hour. Trains take workers into the city, passing people already at work, in markets and on the streets. We hear voiceovers from several people who live there, who have arrived there from elsewhere in the country. No doubt there are a multitude of stories in this big (maybe naked) city, but we pick out three of them, two at first. Prabha (Kani Kusruti) and Anu (Divya Prabha) are housemates and work as nurses. Prabha entered into an arranged marriage, but her husband is in Germany and she hasn’t heard from him in over a year. Dr Manoj (Azees Nedumangad) has his eye on Prabha, but she declines his advances by telling him she is married. Anu is secretly in a relationship with Shiaz (Hridhu Haroon), and knows that his and her families will not approve because he is a Muslim. The third of the three woman is Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam), a cook at the hospital where Prabha and Anu work. She is faced with eviction from her home (a chawl, low-cost and low-quality housing similar to a tenement, usually associated with poverty) due to a landlord wishing the demolish it to build a skyscraper, and Prabha helps her in her fight.

As this site is based in an English-speaking country, we’re well aware that our access to cinema in other languages is partial, though with home media and streaming services, we are better catered for than we were. I’m not the only one here old enough to remember a time when, if you wanted to see foreign-language films, you had to travel to a cinema showing them, in my case meaning London, or wait for likely once-only showings on television. And what was available was always affected by the vagaries of distribution logistics and particular directors and countries going in and out of fashion. But at least some of it was available. However, it was always pretty clear without much digging that our view of a country’s cinema was not that of the people going to the movies there – and very likely vice versa too. Often we saw the more arthouse output while the films that actually packed them in weren’t exported. To give just one example, while many British and American cineastes could have a good grounding in French cinema, in France the films in question were mostly as arthouse as they were here, though without the added one-inch barrier of subtitles (to quote Bong Joon-ho when Parasite won the Oscar for Best Picture) to clear. None of the New Wave directors had a hit at the local box office before François Truffaut did with The Last Metro.

India has one of the largest film industries in the world, and to be fair commercial films in the several official languages of the country are often shown in the UK. They are not usually shown to the press and are marketed to local communities, but the biggest hits often turn up in the box office top ten on their opening weekends. Yet in arthouse terms, there’s not been a lot. There are classic directors of the past such as Satyajit Ray, many of whose films are available on disc. When
All We Imagine as Light premiered in competition at Cannes, it was the first Indian film (strictly speaking an international coproduction, with production companies in France, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and Italy as well as India) to do so for thirty years, since Swaham (directed by Shaji N. Karun, also coincidentally a majority Malayalam-language film) in 1994. Kapadia’s film won the Grand Prix, effectively the second prize behind Sean Baker’s Anora. All We Imagine as Light was Kapadia’s second feature, and first dramatic feature, following the documentary A Night of Knowing Nothing, which had premiered at Cannes in Directors’ Fortnight in 2021 and won the Golden Eye award. She had also directed four short films, two of which appear as extras on this release. (At the time of writing, A Night of Knowing Nothing is available to stream on BFI Player with a subscription.)

Two of Kapadia’s earlier films were documentaries, and All We Imagine as Light certainly begins like one, with those exteriors of Mumbai at night. The film’s visual style is not overtly stylised and generally Kapadia’s direction and Ranabir Das’s (digital) cinematography doesn’t draw attention to itself. Yet the film is anything but fly-on-the-wall and is consciously designed: note the frequent recurrence of shades of blue during the film. It may begin in a city, but it not a city film. Just over an hour in to a film which runs just under two, we shift with the three principals to Parvaty’s village near Ratnagiri, on the Arabian sea coast in southwestern India. Unbeknownst to Anu, Shiaz has followed them there. It’s here that revelations take place, with a slip from strict realism in one of the storylines.

You can see the roots of All We Imagine as Light quite easily: a low-key generally realist approach, not unreminiscent of Italian neorealism, if in colour. It gives us a vivid picture of modern India, in particular the place of women in it, whether at home with your housemate or in the female-dominated workplace of the hospital. While Mumbai is apparently safer than many places for women, no place is entirely so and this is something Prabha and Anu have to negotiate. Shame and societal prejudice play a part too: Prabha has her absent husband, while Anu her lover from a religion unacceptable to her family. The film’s multiple languages also elucidate shifts in social position. Both hailing from Kerala, Prabha and Anu are native Malayalam speakers, though the official language and the predominant one in this large city is Hindi. Dr Manoj, for example, is learning Hindi and finding it a struggle. (This is something non-Indian speakers might not appreciate when everything is equally subtitled, but see below under Sound and Vision.) There’s another subtlety which would likely be lost to non-Indians in the film’s Malayalam title: the principal character’s name Prabha means “light” so, Kapadia says, the film could be called “Everything Prabha thought”. Towards the end of the film, Shiaz says, “In the darkness you try to imagine light, but you cannot.” The final scene takes place in half-light: dusk, but soon it will be dawn.

As well as winning its Cannes Prize, All We Imagine as Light topped Sight & Sound’s Best of 2024 poll. It received Golden Globe nominations for Best Non-English Language Motion Picture and for Kapadia as Best Director, though those were won by Emilia Pérez and Brady Corbet for The Brutalist respectively. Emilia Pérez also beat it to the BAFTA for Best Film Not in the English Language. There was some controversy when it was not submitted for the Best International Film Oscar for either France or India, with the Film Federation of India stating that they regarded the film as a European one taking place in India rather than an Indian one.

All We Imagine as Light is released in a dual-format (Blu-ray and DVD) by the BFI. This is a review of the former, a disc encoded for Region B only. (The DVD, not supplied for review, is PAL-format and Region 2 encoded.) The main feature has a 15 certificate. The two short films do not appear on the BBFC website at the time of writing.

The film was digitally captured on the Arri Alexa Mini and is presented in its intended ratio of 1.66:1. As this is a new film which has existed in the digital realm from shooting to projection and disc authoring (I’m not aware that it has ever been shown in a 35mm print), you’d expect it to be pristine, and it is, matching what I saw in a DCP cinema showing.

The soundtrack is available in either DTS-HD MA 5.1 or LPCM 2.0 (playing in surround). There’s not much to choose between them, with the LPCM track mixed very fractionally louder. The dialogue is clear and the surrounds are taken up with ambient sounds (city or seaside) and Topshe’s music score. This is a multilingual film, with Malayalam, Hindi and Marathi being the main ones spoken, but there are short exchanges in Gujarati, Bengali and Tamil and a small amount of English and German. Two sets of subtitles are available: those translating the non-English dialogue (that is, almost all of it) and an English hard-of-hearing set. The latter are especially useful because as well as translating the dialogue and rendering music and sound effects, they also indicate when the languages spoken change, which I wouldn’t have known otherwise as the only official language of India I speak and understand is English. The English subtitles on Afternoon Clouds (Hindi-language) and And What is the Summer Saying? (Marathi) are fixed.

Introduction by Payal Kapadia (0:33)
An Alternative Family: An Interview with Payal Kapadia (21:39)
The menu gives you the opportunity to watch the film with a short introduction by the director. As you might guess from its brevity, Kapadia doesn’t say much in it, with just an overview of her film’s subject matter. Clearly recorded at the same time, her interview allows her to go into more depth. She begins by talking about her early interest in film, which was at first a fascination with editing, and a realisation that this is a vital part of the process. She approaches filmmaking as a craft as much as an art, and speaks about her process of collaboration with the crew and the cast. All We Imagine as Light was made outside the main Indian commercial industry, and as financing of independent films in the country is difficult, she looked for overseas funding via contacts made at foreign festivals. Kapadia was born in Mumbai, but often did not live there, so she talks about her approaches to filming the city. This is despite it being a much-filmed city, so permissions to shoot can be expensive, and using sets would defeat the object of using the real locations. She also says that she finds Mumbai a safer place than most, especially for women.

Trying to Survive: An Interview with Kani Kusruti (21:24)
Kusruti begins by talking of her upbringing. She was born in a small village to activist parents and so had a radical upbringing. Her parents had dropped their surnames due to their being markers of social status, instead using the initial K, so she was at first known as Kani K. She had to provide a last name for school so chose Kusruti (which a subtitle on this interview helpfully explains means “mischievous” in Malayalam), and has used it in her acting career. In parts of India, acting is a profession somewhat disapproved of, making her a “bad girl” for doing it. She also talks about working for a female director, and one who was not a native Malayalam speaker making a film mostly in that language. (Although Kapadia is the sole credited writer, she worked with others on translations into the various languages used in the film.) When Kusruti started in the industry, there were almost no women on set who weren’t there to act, but over time she has seen more women in the crew and appreciated working on this film where the director was one.

Afternoon Clouds (13:07)
And What is the Summer Saying? (23:27)
These two short films written and directed by Payal Kapadia date from 2017 and 2018. Afternoon Clouds features a widow (Usha Naik) who lives with her domestic helper Malti (Trimala Adhikani). The two women talk, cook together, have afternoon naps. Then there is a surprise visitor. And What is the Summer Saying? takes place in a village in a forest where women listen out for the voices of long-lost loves. It was derived from audio recordings Kapadia made while working in the village, taken with the speakers’ permission with the assurance that their faces would not be shown. They aren’t identified on screen except in a list in the end credits.

The first thing you notice about both of these shorts is the sound design. Although the dialogue, spare as it is, is normally pitched, the abiding sense is of quiet and calm, with ambient sounds mixed low and barely there. The films require close attention and no doubt many cultural references passed this viewer by on two viewings. (For that reason, buying one of the first pressing of this release is recommended, as Rachel Pronger’s essays in the booklet fill in a lot of useful information.)

Afternoon Clouds was made in colour and is presented in a ratio of 1.66:1, like the main feature. And What is the Summer Saying? mixes black and white colour and is in the ratio of 1.37:1. Both films have LPCM 2.0 soundtracks.

Theatrical trailer (1:36)
A standard trailer for a film which is, while technically new, already has its festival reputation preceding it. So there are critical quotes interspersed throughout, in keeping with the likely arthouse audience for this film.

Booklet
The BFI’s booklet with the first pressing of this release runs to thirty-two pages plus covers. After a spoiler warning, Elhum Shakerifar begins with “All Prabha Imagines”, which plays on the double meaning in the Malayalam title (see above). While this does, as you would expect from an overview essay, cover Payal Kapadia’s earlier career (including A Night of Knowing Nothing) and something of the film’s production, it spends much more time on an analysis of its themes and techniques, with particular attention paid to the shifts of language we hear.

Isabel Stevens is next, with “‘There Are a Lot of Things I Want to Talk About in My Film That Cannot Be Expressed in Words’”, an edited version of an article from Sight & Sound in December 2024. She begins with making the comparison I did above with Naked City, in the sense that the city (Mumbai in this case) contains multitudes. We have the stories of three people, but many others could be just as worthy of attention. Stevens quotes Vittorio De Sica, who saw no future in the movement he was at the forefront of (Italian neorealism, for example his own Bicycle Thieves) if it “surmounted the barrier separating the documentary from drama and poetry” and argues that in this film Kapadia does just that. She interviews Kapadia who cites Chantal Akerman as a filmmaker who did the same. Kapadia sees her film as a chance to explore identity in India, much of it driven by class, caste and religion, and love being a resistance to society, especially for women. Kapadia became interested in film at a young age due to her artist mother’s experiments with video installations. Later she applied to the Film and Television Institute of India in Pune, being accepted there on her second attempt. Kapadia talks about the making of the film, including the challenges of making it in a language (Malayalam) she does not speak, working with the assistant director and paying as much attention to the sound of the dialogue as the sense of it.

Also from Sight & Sound is Arjun Sajip’s “All We Imagine as Light: The View from Cannes, 2024”. This isn’t quite written in the white heat of the film showing as it follows the prize win at the end of the festival. However it picks up on a lot of the film, its influences and look and style, including the use of voiceover (rather timely in retrospect, evoking Chantal Akerman’s News from Home). Quite rightly, it points to the film being something of a European-style arthouse film set in India rather than a specifically Indian film, but unlike the Indian authorities sees that as a positive.

After a cast and crew listing, there are notes on and credits for the extras, with (as mentioned above) two particularly useful essays by Rachel Pronger on the short films.

From its premiere at Cannes, All We Imagine as Light established itself as one of the films of 2024, and one of the major Indian films of the last few decades on the festival/arthouse circuit. As so often, I’d recommend buying one of the first pressing of this release, as the booklet adds quite a lot of contextual information.