All We Imagine as Light and the Poetry of Urban Solitude—A Reflection

Kani Kusuruti in All We Imagine as Light | Photo courtesy: BBC

All We Imagine as Light (2024), directed by Payal Kapadia, is a contemplative drama that follows the intertwined lives of three women in Mumbai. Prabha (Kani Kusruti), a nurse whose husband lives in Germany, navigates her solitary existence between hospital shifts and sparse communication with her distant spouse. Anu (Divya Prabha), her roommate, conducts a secret relationship across religious boundaries. Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam), an older widow, fights to maintain her home and identity against forces of urban development. The film transitions from Mumbai’s cramped, fluorescent-lit spaces to a transformative journey to a coastal village, where the women briefly escape the constraints of their urban lives.

On January 3, 2025, a Letterboxd user left a review of All We Imagine as Light (2024), writing:

I seriously can’t comprehend what’s so special about this film. Why is it hyped this much??? Call me illiterate, layman, uncivilized, misogynist, and whatnot. But I am not gonna pretend. Thank you.

And so, I watched All We Imagine as Light. To this user, I say: “illiterate, layman, uncivilised, misogynist, and whatnot.”

Kapadia is not asking for pretence. She invites us to witness with open eyes. This is how I experienced All We Imagine as Light.

Step 1: Sit in a dark theater.

Step 2: Let Mumbai seep through the screen.

Step 3: Remember how to breathe in someone else’s solitude.

There is something (scattered and whole) to be said about watching three women navigate a city that swallows stories entirely. Who gets to be seen and how and what it reveals—of desire, of displacement, of the Politics of Being a Woman in Scrubs at 3 AM in a City that Never Learned Your Mother Tongue. 

There is something about watching a film about your city that makes you forget how to breathe properly. Especially when it shows you things you have spent years trying not to notice—the way fluorescent lights make everyone look like they are drowning, how night shift workers carry their exhaustion like a second uniform, how some loves can only exist in borrowed clothes and borrowed time.

These moments of revelation are illuminated, literally and figuratively, by the film’s careful attention to how light shapes experience and memory.

But first, a meditation on light:

• Fluorescent tubes in hospital corridors;

• The glow of a phone screen showing “No New Messages”;

• A German rice cooker’s power indicator blinking red in an empty kitchen;

• The radiance of a burqa-clad love story;

• Memory-light, dream-light, all-we-dare-not-speak-of light.

Kapadia knows this grammar of illumination—how to light a scene so it feels like a memory, how to shoot a hospital corridor so it becomes a metaphor for migration. She knows of bodies in space: of hurt, of home, dreams stacked like shifts, of widows in homes that people want to erase and she knows of all of us, somewhere between belonging and displacement.

To make sense of this film is to understand that every Mumbai story is a story of light and its absence. Mumbai is not just any metropolis with shadows—it is a city where light, filled with grit, cuts differently. It is in the harsh fluorescence of suburban trains at 4 a.m. carrying workers home alongside vegetable vendors heading to market. It is in the flickering streetlamps of Kamathipura, where visibility is both salvation and danger. Only in Mumbai does light filter through blue tarpaulin settlements next to gleaming towers, creating a particular quality of glow that belongs neither to the privileged nor the forgotten. 

Kapadia’s Mumbai exists in the gaps between local train compartments, in the chawls (large tenement houses ,especially in the factory cities of India) being swallowed by redevelopment, in the particular way headlights illuminate faces at Marine Drive at midnight—a geography of belonging that remains stubbornly, defiantly specific. 

Consider the choreography of loneliness:

1. A woman opens a package containing a rice cooker sent from far away, her fingers tracing the buttons as her husband's voice crackles through a delayed phone call.

2. Another applies borrowed lipstick in a hotel bathroom mirror, adjusting unfamiliar clothes before stepping out to meet a love that exists only in rented rooms.

3. A third stands in a government office clutching decades-old utility bills and faded photographs, her voice growing hoarse as she insists that her existence in this city wasn’t a dream.

   
   

The film moves like a city breathes—in fragmented moments of connection so brief you might miss them if you blink. Like that scene where Anu and her boyfriend of a different religion share a moment in a doorway, and the whole weight of India’s history is balanced on the edge of a glance. The texture of longing, Mumbai’s longing, is captured on film.

Here is a secret about watching movies about cities: every urban love story is actually about time. How we spend it, waste it, try to catch it. Prabha knows this, counting the hours between her husband’s silence. Anu knows this, measuring her freedom in stolen moments. Parvaty knows this, fighting for the right to keep her years intact in a space that is trying to forget her.

To watch Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine as Light is to remember every night shift you have ever worked, even if you have never worked one. See Prabha, moving through hospital corridors like a ghost who has not realised she is still alive. Her hands know the work, but her heart? That is somewhere over in Germany, or maybe it never left her hometown. Who can say? Cities, living and not,  have a way of scattering our organs across continents.

To the point (overrated in a city that moves in circles): this is a film about light, yes, but also about:

• The weight of hospital uniforms at dawn.

• The taste of chai shared on a wet, stinking night. 

• The sound of construction that never stops.

• The texture of loneliness and sweat in a city of millions.

• The colour of hope under a broken AC.

In the film’s pivotal third act, Prabha—the older nurse whose quiet dedication to her hospital routine has structured much of the narrative—embarks on an unexpected journey to a coastal village. This departure from Mumbai’s endless corridors and cramped quarters marks a significant shift in both tone and visual language. When Prabha finally reaches that coastal village, when reality starts to blur like watercolour in the rain, we understand: sometimes you have to leave a city to see it clearly. Only when you leave can you come back.  Sometimes, imagination is the only way home. 

Cinema exists in the space between seconds. Kapadia’s Mumbai exists in the space between stories. This film lives somewhere in between. The city of dreams. The city of skinny dogs, the city of bruised women, of fat men, of greed and lust and sweetness and vibrance. Of violence and bleeding and healing and gauze. Sweat stains on your back, dog shit on your fingernails, flowers in your hair and being an “in-betweener” in your city.  

What I mean is—

Every frame is a city.  Every city is a story we are trying to tell ourselves about belonging. We would like to tell a story without being in it. This realisation emerges from watching how Kapadia positions her characters within Mumbai’s vastness—how they simultaneously inhabit the city and are dwarfed by it. What I am suggesting is that we often desire the impossible: to observe our own lives with detachment, to understand our place in the larger narrative without the limitations of our personal perspective. We want the clarity of distance without actually leaving.  Kapadia knows this, her camera knows this, and her characters know this. Now we know this too.

Step 1: Watch the credits roll.

Step 2: Step out into your own city.

Step 3: Look for the lights you never noticed before.

Step 4: Remember that somewhere, someone is starting their life.

Step 5: That the city continues, with or without your watching.

Not just in its light but all we imagine it could be.

(Edited by Teista Dwivedi and Srijana Siri)