SILVER

Grand Prix, 2024 Cannes Film Festival; Nominee, Best Motion Picture – Non-English Language and Best Director, 2025 Golden Globes

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 Prix 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 (Divya Prabha) — plus their coworker, cook Parvaty (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 superb actresses 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 their complexities and richness. DIR/SCR Payal Kapadia; PROD Julien Graff, Thomas Hakim. France/India/Netherlands/Luxembourg, 2024, color, 118 min. In Malayalam and Hindi with English subtitles. NOT RATED