One of the most acclaimed films of the year, Payal Kapadia’s dazzling Cannes Film Festival Grand Prize winner All We Imagine as Light is now finally rolling out stateside. After stops at Telluride, TIFF, and NYFF, Sideshow and Janus Films will release it in U.S. theaters starting November 15 and now have debuted the new trailer. While India foolishly didn’t select it to compete in the international feature category at this year’s Academy Awards, hopefully it’ll take an Anatomy of a Fall-esque path this season.
Here’s the synopsis: “The light, the lives, and the textures of contemporary, working-class Mumbai are explored and celebrated by writer/director Payal Kapadia, who won the Grand Prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival for her revelatory fiction feature debut. Centering on two roommates who also work together in a city hospital—head nurse Prabha (Kani Kusruti) and recent hire Anu (DivyaPrabha)—plus theircoworker, cookParvaty (Chhaya Kadam), Kapadia’s film alights on moments of connection and heartache, hope and disappointment. Prabha, her husband from an arranged marriage living in faraway Germany, is courted by a doctor at her hospital; Anu carries on a romance with a Muslim man, which she must keep a secret from her strict Hindu family; Parvaty finds herself dealing with a sudden eviction from her apartment. Kapadia captures the bustle of the metropolis and the open-air tranquility of a seaside village with equal radiance, articulated by her superbactresses and by the camera with a lyrical naturalism that occasionally drifts into dreamlike incandescence. All We Imagine as Light is a soulful study of the transformative power of friendship and sisterhood, in all its complexities and richness.”
Luke Hicks said in his review, “Writer-director Payal Kapadia isn’t interested in the flashy world of Mumbai that gets so much global attention. Per its opening soundscape, All We Imagine as Light means to bask in the luminescence of life found among India’s lower classes, which means acknowledging the inequality and socio-economic injustice that defines their everyday as much as it means showcasing their intrinsic glow and dogged refusal to let the inalienable love, beauty, and camaraderie of existence be taken from them.”
See the trailer below.
The post U.S. Trailer for Payal Kapadia’s Dazzling Cannes Winner All We Imagine as Light first appeared on The Film Stage.
