All We Imagine as Light

Payal Kapadia's first fiction feature won the Grand Prix at Cannes in 2024 — the first Indian film in the main competition for thirty years, and the first ever to take that prize. It was financed almost entirely in Europe, by French, Dutch and Luxembourgish producers with support from the Aide aux cinémas du monde, which is how a film in Malayalam, Hindi and Marathi comes to belong in a European catalogue.

Kani Kusruti and Divya Prabha play nurses sharing a flat in Mumbai: one married to a man who emigrated and stopped writing, the other conducting a relationship her family would not permit. Ranabir Das shoots the first half in the blue of a monsoon city that never fully goes dark, mostly at night, mostly in transit — trains, corridors, hospital light — and then relocates to a coastal village where the palette and the pace change completely.

Reviews were close to unanimous, and the film ran through the season on critics' lists and into Golden Globe and European Film Award nominations. Kapadia came out of documentary — her A Night of Knowing Nothing won the Golden Eye at Cannes in 2021 — and the observational patience shows: this is a film about work and tiredness and friendship long before it is about romance.