All We Imagine As Light movie review: Payal Kapadia’s lyrical ode to working-class Mumbai and female friendship

All We Imagine As Light movie review: Beautifully shot by Kapadia’s constant cinematographer Ranabir Das, the film is suffused with light, lambent in some places, shard-like in others.A woman leans on a pole in her compartment, for support, for balance, swaying with the rhythm of the train. She looks exhausted, after a long day at work. We take in, like she does, the way the city looks at night, bars of refracted light and darkness dancing across her face. This image, which comes early in Payal Kapadia’s lyrical ode to working-class Mumbai and female friendship, becomes a marker of the themes the film explores, and it stays with you.I watched the film at its first screening at the Cannes Film Festival in May, where it won the Grand Prix award, wowing some of the world’s most hard-nosed critics. Those of us who had seen her earlier work, especially the striking documentary ‘A Night Of Knowing Nothing’, based on the student agitation at the director’s alma mater, the FTII (Film and Telev...