{"id":10632,"date":"2025-02-28T08:00:00","date_gmt":"2025-02-28T13:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/?p=10632"},"modified":"2025-02-25T22:08:33","modified_gmt":"2025-02-26T03:08:33","slug":"all-we-imagine-as-light","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/2025\/02\/28\/all-we-imagine-as-light\/","title":{"rendered":"All We Imagine as Light."},"content":{"rendered":"\n

All That We Imagine As Light<\/em> might be better known for the controversy over its exclusion from the Oscar nomination than for the film itself; India\u2019s film board, which has a history of dubious choices in this regard, declined to submit it as the country\u2019s entry for this year\u2019s Academy Award for Best International Feature Film, instead submitting a comedy called Laapataa (Lost) Ladies<\/em>. That film did not make the Academy\u2019s shortlist, further enraging supporters of All That We Imagine As Light<\/em>, and leading to some recriminatory comments from the Indian film board, including some cheap shots at this film and its director, Payal Kapadia. Much of this is the result of the Academy\u2019s one-film-per-country rule, of course, but after India also passed over RRR<\/a><\/em> two years ago, the criticism of their selection process seems to have some merit. (You can rent All We Imagine As Light<\/em> on iTunes<\/a>, amazon<\/a>, etc.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The shame is that Kapadia\u2019s feature-length debut is a lovely film, following two women from Mumbai out to the country, where they go to help a local woman who has been evicted from the flat where she has lived for over 20 years because she has no papers to prove her residency and developers are throwing her out. Prabha is a nurse whose husband via an arranged marriage now lives and works in Germany and hasn\u2019t called her for over a year, while her roommate, the younger Anu, has a clandestine affair with a young Muslim man, Shiaz, which neither Anu\u2019s Hindu family nor Shiaz\u2019s would approve. Prabha\u2019s colleague Manoj, a doctor at the hospital, is clearly interested in her, but she demurs because she\u2019s married.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is a leisurely film, one that sprinkles in some bits of daily life without fully explaining them or connecting them to the main story. Prabha receives a gift in the mail without a name attached, and while we might infer where it\u2019s from, it simply doesn\u2019t come up again. Once the two women follow their neighbor to the rural village where she\u2019s returning, however, there is at least some tension, as Shiaz follows Anu to continue their rendezvous, and Prabha discovers what\u2019s really going on behind her back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The film has the coveted 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, with 145 reviews, and it feels like a movie that critics should love. It has a simple story with a small set of characters and goes deep on the two main ones, allowing them to develop over the course of its two hours in a very natural fashion, with absolutely nothing extraordinary or unbelievable in the plot to break its spell. Yet beneath this ease is a precision in movement, direction, scene, even music, with songs by the late Ethiopian nun Emahoy Tsegu\u00e9-Maryam Gu\u00e8brou, whose estate granted Kapadia the rights to use her songs. It has the feeling of a model ship assembled in a bottle: It is such a small thing, yet the labor and patience required to put it together are evident if you just look for it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That said, I\u2019m probably a lot lower on All We Imagine as Light<\/em> than most professional critics \u2013 I recognize the skill and the care taken to make it, but it is quite slow, and my unquiet mind was wandering a bit in the middle third or so. (Also, just watching it made me feel hot. I don\u2019t know when exactly in the year it was filmed, but everyone looks very uncomfortable. I would not survive long in India, clearly.) I wanted to connect more with the two characters, but the film is demanding a little more of the audience than I could give. I recognize this is my issue, not the movie\u2019s. It\u2019s easy for me to say \u201cthis could have been 20 minutes shorter,\u201d but when I offer that criticism, I usually have specific content I think the director or editor should have cut. Nothing here feels extraneous, though. Its pace is the natural result of its story, and it took just shy of two hours to tell it. Your mileage may vary.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

All That We Imagine As Light might be better known for the controversy over its exclusion from the Oscar nomination than for the film itself; India\u2019s film board, which has a history of dubious choices in this regard, declined to submit it as the country\u2019s entry for this year\u2019s Academy Award for Best International Feature […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1417,1213,215],"class_list":["post-10632","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-2024-movies","tag-indian-films","tag-movies","entry"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10632","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10632"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10632\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10633,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10632\/revisions\/10633"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10632"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10632"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10632"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}