The Big City: Kapadia Designs Lovely Portrait of Friendship and Free Will
Mumbai is a city of illusions, a character remarks in Payal Kapadia’s debut narrative feature, All We Imagine as Light. To survive, one has to buy into the illusion. Opening upon a bus moving through the city, a variety of offscreen characters share their thoughts on the difficulties of living there, a place of impermanence, a city which robs one’s time. We focus on a quiet, withdrawn woman who works as a senior nurse at a specialty hospital, and slowly begin to learn about her life, which includes a new roommate, a much younger nurse who’s just embarked on a clandestine romance.… Read the rest