A city can give you work without giving you room to live. It can place thousands of people around you and still make an intimate conversation difficult. All We Imagine as Light begins from that recognisable urban contradiction.
Payal Kapadia’s film follows nurses Prabha and Anu in Mumbai, and the relationships that form around their working lives. Its 2024 Cannes Grand Prix made it an international headline. The more lasting invitation is quieter: to consider friendship as something that helps make a city inhabitable. Cannes records the award.
The city is a working arrangement
Kapadia told interviewer Mythily Ramachandran that she wanted to explore women negotiating life and work in Mumbai. Her research included conversations with nurses and hospital staff, alongside the history of mill workers and housing. The screenplay emerged through years of work, not simply a collection of picturesque city impressions. The filmmaker describes that process in the interview.
This is a useful way into the film. A home is not only a location, and a job is not only background information. Together they determine how much energy remains for desire, how much privacy can be found, and whom a person can depend on when an arrangement fails.
For anyone who has moved to a metropolis, those questions need little translation. The film makes them substantial enough to carry a drama.
Three women, no perfect support system
Prabha, played by Kani Kusruti, and Anu, played by Divya Prabha, share an apartment. Their colleague Parvaty, played by Chhaya Kadam, faces losing her home. Kapadia does not describe their friendship as flawless: in the same interview, she stresses the women’s imperfections and her interest in the support friends can provide away from home.
That qualification matters. A friendship becomes dramatically alive when care can coexist with irritation, judgement and misunderstanding. Perfect solidarity would turn the women into an argument. Their differences allow them to remain people.
A change in the light
The production gave the film’s movement out of Mumbai a physical basis. Kapadia shot the city during the 2023 monsoon, then waited until November for the Ratnagiri section. She wanted the later landscape’s dry grass and exposed red earth to register a change in season and place.
Speaking separately to AP, she described an intended movement from a documentary-like opening towards a dreamlike state, with time slowing in the second part. The interview connects that formal shift to her approach. The change is more than a new backdrop: it opens another way of imagining what these lives might contain.
Beyond the postcard
It is tempting to praise any evocative urban film as a love letter to its city. Kapadia’s Mumbai suggests a more demanding relationship. Affection does not erase the terms on which people are allowed to remain.
The film’s generosity lies in taking those negotiations seriously while leaving room for tenderness. A city is made visible through the people who sustain one another inside it. In that version of Mumbai, friendship is part of the infrastructure.