A couple of weeks ago, I arrived slightly late to see a performance my friend was in. Nervous about disturbing the show, I made a beeline for what I thought was an empty chair in the first row. When I got closer, however, I noticed that although there wasn’t a person in the chair, it was occupied by a coat, a sign to me that it was being saved for someone else. I paused unsure of myself and acutely aware of my body as an obstruction to the performance. But just then, the man in the adjacent chair moved his coat, beckoning me to sit. He didn’t so much as look at me as I settled in, but he leaned in close and, with such a sense of knowing and affection, whispered, “’Bout time you showed up.” I gave an awkward chuckle, struck by the familiarity of his tone. For the next few minutes, I was entirely unable to focus on the play in front of me, consumed by this oddly intimate moment I had just shared with a stranger. A world of possibilities regarding our connection, history, and future opened up to me. Who was I to this man? His chronically late girlfriend? An old friend he was hoping to catch up with before the show? A student with whom he had developed a sort of paternal relationship? I allowed myself to find warmth in the intimacy of it…until, that is, not five minutes later, he turned to me, and the illusion dissipated. “You’re not my wife!” 

Two weeks later, I find myself thinking about this experience in relation to Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine As Light, which recently won the Grand Prix at Cannes Film Festival. Kapadia’s first fictional feature takes audiences through the day-to-day lives of three working-class women living in Mumbai. Prabha (Kani Kusruti) and Anu (Divya Prabha) are roommates, both working as nurses in the same hospital and facing romantic strife. Prabha’s husband has been living abroad for the majority of their marriage, while Anu is involved in a secret, forbidden romance with a Muslim man. Through Prabha, we also meet Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam), a widowed cook at the hospital, who is being evicted from her apartment by developers.

All We Imagine As Light is a slow and careful film that is as filled with emotion and detail as the city of Mumbai is filled with people. It’s just as much about intergenerational kinship and desire as it is about migration and labor, for example. The performances are strong, and I appreciate that Kapadia doesn’t shy away from playfulness within the structure and form of the film. However, what compels me the most is how expertly she uncovers the intense intimacy of the everyday, especially through the film’s visual language. With colorful, close shots, the camerawork is nothing short of painterly, crowding us into the cluttered spaces–both physical and emotional–in which the characters reside. In one particularly devastating scene, Prabha cries while clutching a rice cooker. Her body fills the entire screen, only fitting in the frame because her back is curled around the device, and her right knee reaches out toward the audience with the rice cooker nestled between her legs like a lover. 

All We Imagine As Light understands people to be inherently interesting even–especially–in their most banal moments: checking under a patient’s tongue for medication, bus ride conversations with a lover, dancing at work at the end of a shift, or crying over a rice cooker. There’s no real driving conflict or resolution, but Kapadia proves that these scenes, in their blur of tension and heightened confession, are enough to carry a movie if treated with the appropriate attention and care. The penultimate scene takes a gentle turn that reminds me a bit of Abbas Kiarostami’s Certified Copy (another excellent film). Prabha slips into make-believe with a man she saves from drowning in Parvaty’s coastal village. As she tends to his wounds, she regards him as her husband and asks him why he left her. He takes on this role, apologizing and kissing her gently. She tells him to stop and that she never wants to see him again, something she cannot tell her absent husband directly. The camera meanders through this moment of connection between two strangers recognizing each other’s needs, lingering where necessary before bringing us out to the broader world. 

And just like my encounter with the stranger in the theatre, this scene, and the film at large, shows us that there’s so much tenderness and longing nestled in the quotidian, so many moments of connection and care for each other and ourselves that go unspoken or passed by too quickly. Anyone can be a stranger to you in one moment and a trusted ally/lover/sister in the next. 

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