All We Imagine As Light

The camera peers up at the star-spotted night sky filtered through the canopy of a forest. Like a painting, the light of the stars seems to fit perfectly between the trees. Then Ranabir Das’s camera repositions to a close-up of a woman’s hairline, so close one can spot dandruff, before slowly revealing the full body of the squatting woman, Anu (Divya Prabha), peeing on the forest floor. For most filmmakers, such a reveal would be either humorous or charged with an inescapable embarrassment (synonymous with the action of urination in movies). For director Payal Kapadia, in her follow-up to her 2021 quasi-documentary A Night of Knowing Nothing, the moment is both beautiful and mundane. And, by treating the female body with such unkempt humanity, All We Imagine As Light challenges mainstream depictions of desi women.

Most of the 2024 Cannes Film Festival Grand Prix winner takes place not in the forests of Ratnagiri but in the ever-noisy and crowded Mumbai. Das uses a handheld camera that allows him to get close enough to his characters to smell them, giving the city both a shaky realist intensity (think of the aesthetic of journalism movies) and an emotional vulnerability reminiscent of an encounter on an urban subway system. The close proximity of the camera and character-driven films of Goran Stolevski (Housekeeping for Beginners, Of an Age) might be some of the best recent analogs to the feeling radiated here. Through the ever-close camera and other creative choices, Kapadia maximises the controlled emotions put forward by Kani Kusruti as Prabha, a nurse, and her roommate and colleague Anu. The two are in very different life situations. At least, it would appear to be so. Prabha has been estranged from her husband, whom she was arranged to marry, for quite some time when she receives an out-of-the-blue rice cooker from Germany, where he lives and works.

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