What the Film Actually Is
All We Imagine as Light follows two nurses — one middle-aged, one young — living in Mumbai, navigating the city's indifference and the particular loneliness of people who are not supposed to be lonely because they are surrounded by other people. Payal Kapadia's direction is observational to the point of becoming invisible: the camera watches the women live rather than instructing the audience how to feel about what it is watching.
The cinematography by Ranabir Das treats Mumbai as a city that does not accommodate its inhabitants but coexists with them — the spaces the characters move through have a history and an indifference that the film uses as a kind of pressure. The city is not a backdrop. It is a condition.
The Performances Are Quietly Extraordinary
Kani Kusruti and Divya Prabha give performances that operate at a register almost never seen in Indian mainstream cinema: genuinely interior, without the telegraphing of emotion that both Bollywood and the art-house tradition often require. You are watching people think, which is the hardest thing to film and the rarest thing to find in a performance.
The Distribution Scandal
The film played on fewer than fifty screens in India despite winning the Cannes Grand Prix. This is not a footnote — it is the story. The country that made this film decided it was not commercially viable enough to show to its own people. That decision reflects a distribution infrastructure calibrated entirely around scale, spectacle, and star power that has no mechanism for the kind of film All We Imagine as Light is. That infrastructure is the problem. This film is the evidence.
Verdict
A masterpiece. See it through whatever means are available to you. Essential.