Writer-director Payal Kapadia’s multi-award winning debut feature film All We Imagine as Light  (AWIAL) won the Jury Grand Prize at the Asia Pacific Screen Awards 2024 held recently in Australia. For glowing reviews, and plot summary, cast and ratings click here.

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All We Imagine As Light    
Directed by Payal Kapadia.
Starring Kani Kusruti, Divya Prabha, Chhaya Kadam, Hridhu Haroon  
In Hindi, Malayalam and Marathi with English sub-titles. 115 minutes

It’s rare for a 21st century mainstream Indian film to enlighten more than it entertains. In that sense, AWIALstands out like the improbable empty, suburban train on a Monday morning in Mumbai, a moving montage of the angst (and ambition) of the suburban fringe: working-class migrants, low-castes, youth, women. Naturally, Kapadia concedes the inescapability of politics, “Love is political…talking about love, becomes a way to talk about a lot of other political ideas. I use romance, silly…as it may be, as a way to camouflage this.”

But, pondering the angst and ambition that vulnerable folk are allowed to feel, Kapadia is clear about what they aren’t: anger. Before filming, she’d done off-the-cuff interviews with such folk, inter-state migrants; many feature as voice overs in her film. One, mulls his suffocation: even if you live in a gutter, you aren’t allowed to feel anger.

As if on cue, what AWIAL’s characters feel isn’t anger. It’s despair. Their counterparts? Real people? The relatively resourceful can afford to defy despair, risking international migration, but too many others can’t. Condemned to internal migration, they’re like moths fluttering toward a lamp, mistaking its burn for brightness alone.

Behold Kapadia’s three women.

For emotionally cloistered nurse Prabha (Kani Kusruti), getting to feel anything is progress. Her equally underpaid roommate, younger, fellow-nurse Anu (Divya Prabha) brims with feeling, but is still deciding what she’ll do with it. When they — briefly — betray anger, it’s toward each other. Ageing cook Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam), widowed, is rendered doubly lowly.

If there is anger, there’s no visible villain to stoke it. Not sufficiently for flame to become fire anyway. Still, albeit faintly, Kapadia indicts the privileged whom she keeps resolutely offscreen; antagonists, because of the crushing inequality, alienation, majoritarianism and disenfranchisement they enforce on the vulnerable. Characters here walk, or board bustling buses or trains, almost never an auto or taxi. Even her minor youthful indulgences, force Anu to borrow to cover shared room-rent; an overwrought Prabha, doubling as cook-servant.

Who are these villains, inferred, yet invisible?

The formidably aggrandizing, aggressive Indian male is missing, except in a photomontage of hilariously ugly men; Anu’s family, bombarding her with groom pics! Women audiences giggle, seemingly inordinately, at these poseurs because their puffed-up ugliness is so typical, so eerily intimate. The builder-developer evicting Parvaty is unseen but his indifference haunts her sad sighs, her vacant stares. An elderly widow patient of Prabha’s senses her husband’s ghost, first, by the stench of his tobacco. Prabha’s estranged migrant-worker husband in Germany, is more spoken about than seen.

What of Kapadia’s three visible men? They’re not oglers, they’re outliers. Dr Manoj, who, sort of, proposes to Prabha is gentlemanly to a fault. Shiaz is more interested in getting Anu into a life of sublime togetherness than in getting her out of her salwar kameez. The third man too (no spoilers) is gentle, conciliatory.

But onscreen men point to offscreen men who’re anything but conciliatory. Perhaps it’s Kapadia who imagines? Not entitled men as they are, but who they can be? Can they aspire to the other-centeredness that comes more naturally to her women?

AWIAL redefines an Indian metropolitan city more as a suburban (than urban) giant, guaranteeing mediocrity— or worse — for the vulnerable, pampering for the protected. Despair drenches every frame, tinged with an almost dainty defiance. Prabha, weighing life in a semi-rural district against that in a city, imagines it is as beautiful “here” as it is “there”.

In their compromise with despair, it’s as if AWIAL’s feminine trio are paraphrasing Thoreau to say, a trifle pedantically: the mass of women lead lives of quiet desperation. As one sequence shows, at least dreams clarify, even awaken. Illusions? They only lull, tranquilizing rather than transforming.

Art can be a form of revolt for the desperate. Sometimes it’s mere refuge. Dr Manoj, besotted with Prabha, writes her a poem, but terrified of baring his soul to her face, prefers it read in secret. Anu and Shiaz, stealing togetherness in a cave, marvel at how impish lovers use graffiti to shout in private what they dared not whisper in public.

Kapadia spurns the petty one-upmanship of regional divides, using “Southern” voices (her principal cast are from Kerala) to tell her “Northern” story (she and many of her crew are from Maharashtra or up north). Her message is far from parochial, mightier than Mumbai, by, of and for all of India, most truthful in the anguished multi-regional voice overs sprinkled throughout her film.

If decades ago, only a few bits of paper (birth certificate, ration card) could prove identity, now several plastic-digital bits can (Aadhaar, Voter ID). Yet India’s vulnerable still struggle to prove they exist, let alone claim rights rigged to that existence. Evictee Parvaty fumes, powerless to prove she’s dwelt for decades in a home that her dead husband had been rightfully allotted. Her desire to move on (and out) rather than keep fighting, stems from grim acceptance: all she’d imagined as the light of justice, was really the darkness of injustice.