‘All We Imagine as Light’

Jean Paul Mella

Payal Kapadia’s 2024 Malayalam film, All We Imag ine as Light is a remarkable and subtle showcase of the everyday alienated lives of working people in the modern capitalist world. Set in the bustling megacity of Mumbai, the story centers on three women working in a hospital–Prabha, Anu, and Parvathy, played richly by Kani Kusruti, Divya Prabha, and Chhaya Kadam, respectively.

These three working women each struggle with challenges imposed by class society. Prabha copes with the failure of her arranged marriage, Anu (a Hindu) struggles to conceal a secret engagement to a Muslim man, and Parvathy resists eviction from her home following the death of her husband, whose union had won workers’ housing rights. The film often dwells on scenes of Mumbai, with the camera lingering on commuters, shops, and other regular working people going about their lives on the trains and city streets. Cold blue lighting predominates, accentuating the omnipresent alienation permeating the city and its working population. Looming skyscrapers peppered with a few lit apartments draw attention to the distant, inaccessible world of the wealthy above.

The film transcends its setting as much as it pays homage to it. Notably, the film opens with a brief narration in multiple languages from the subcontinent–Marathi, Hindi, Gujarati, and others–as workers describe what motivated them to move to Mumbai from the countryside and seek work in an emerging industry. Their tales are familiar in the development of capitalism: the diverse countryside population migrates into urban centers, despite the squalor, as the rural areas become increasingly desolate and capital demands an ever-larger market of labour power in the industrial centers. From enclosure in the UK in the sixteenth century to the textile mills of 20th-century India, the laws of capitalist development remain universal.

Where the film truly resonates, though, is in the stories of these three women. They serve as the lens through which people experience these much grander historical processes, distilled into intimate personal stories. The oppression of women in class society leaves Prabha subject to the tragedy of an arranged marriage that ended in her abandonment. The religious divisions that find much purpose in capitalism inhibit Anu’s romance. The insatiable appetite for luxury housing (far more profitable than low-income housing) drives Parvathy’s displacement from her home. In particular, Parvathy’s trajectory as a migrant worker under constant threat of displacement speaks to an experience shared by workers throughout the world.

All We Imagine as Light has received well-deserved recognition for Kapadia’s direction and the actresses’ performances, winning the Grand Prix award at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival. While much of the film’s beauty comes from its dream-like depiction of Mumbai, the exceptional aspect is its intimate display of the daily experiences universal to workers in any corner of the world.

[Courtesy: New Worker]

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Frontier
Vol 57, No. 32, Feb 2 - 8, 2025