WEEK IN WOMEN: Payal Kapadia’s ALL WE IMAGINE AS LIGHT on Blu-ray and DVD – Brandy McDonnell reports
Indian writer-director Payal Kapadia’s acclaimed fiction-feature debut film All We Imagine as Light will be released July 22 on Blu-ray and DVD as part of The Criterion Collection. All We Imagine as Light, premiered at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival, where it was awarded the Grand Prix. Janus Contemporaries releases Blu-ray and DVD editions of first-run films, fresh from theaters, in association with the Criterion Channel.
A Mumbai-based filmmaker, Payal Kapadia studied film directing at the Film and Television Institute of India. Her short films Afternoon Clouds (2015) and And What Is the Summer Saying (2018) premiered, respectively, at the Cinéfondation at the Festival de Cannes and the Berlin International Film Festival.
A Night of Knowing Nothing (2021), her first feature-length film, had its premiere in the Director’s Fortnight at the Cannes Film Festival, where it won the Golden Eye award for best documentary. The film chronicles 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. But her 2021 film incorporates fictional letters between two students who have split because they belong to separate castes.
Set against the hypnotic luminescence of Mumbai, All We Imagine as Light follows three different women working at the same hospital — Prabha (Kani Kusruti), Anu (Divya Prabha) and Parvathy (Chhaya Kadam) — each contending with personal and material struggles amid a modernizing India driven by gentrification and rising Hindu nationalism. When Parvathy is evicted and forced to move back to her childhood village, Prabha and Anu travel with her to the seaside, where they shake loose their remaining secrets and—in one otherworldly sequence—a lingering ghost.
The acclaimed All We Imagine as Light is a deep-rooted study of the fortifying power of friendship, propelled by moving performances and the director’s compassionate eye. Continue reading on THE WEEK IN WOMEN
