In a 2017 interview, director Payal Kapadia observed, “You don’t have to look far for inspiration, because the life around us is full of poetic possibilities, including dreams and memories.” This artistic philosophy was on display in her first feature, the documentary A Night of Knowing Nothing, and is even more explicit in All We Imagine as Light, a narrative feature about three women in Mumbai struggling to make things work , whatever. which it might look like. The film’s evocative title (Kapadia is gifted with these) actually describes the experience of watching it, how the insomniac nocturnal mood is stirred by distant colored lights, and how passing into the light requires “imagination.” The light may not be easy, but it’s good enough if we imagine it that way.

Loneliness is the real subject and emotional/geographical dislocation, all the characters coming from elsewhere: Mumbai is a busy polyglot city of transplants. The film opens before sunrise with a long pan of people setting up small sidewalk markets, unloading produce and other goods from trucks, the city already awake. Everything is movement: cars, crowds, trains. People speak in voice-overs, establishing Mumbai – its Edward-Hopper-esque urban loneliness – as the real subject of the film. “There’s always the feeling that I’m going to have to go.” “In Mumbai, there is work and money.” Living in Mumbai you have to ‘get used to impermanence’. This lengthy documentary-style opening ends with a lingering shot of Prabha (Kani Kusruti) sitting in the train on her way to work. She is completely still, the first thing I saw.

Prabha is a nurse at a busy hospital and somewhat separated from her female colleagues: they invite her to their movie nights and dates, even though they know she’ll say no. Prabha had an arranged marriage and her husband left for Germany soon after the wedding. Prabha has not heard from him since. A rice cooker is sent to her apartment anonymously and postmarked in Germany. It is the only proof that it ever existed. In a stunning moment, Prabha sits with the rice cooker on the floor, embracing her passionately. Prabha is not an expressive woman; her heart is deeply hidden from others, so this moment, full of pain and longing, makes her public reserve clear.

Prabha’s roommate Anu (Divya Prabha) is young and restless, secretly meets her Muslim boyfriend Shiaz (Hridhu Haroon) at night. Anu is gossiped about at the hospital and Prabha is warned to keep an eye on her. Anu, however, is in love and stubborn. He wants everything in life, happiness and pleasure, sex and freedom, and he wants it now. Anu ignores Prabha’s disapproval, perhaps sensing the envy behind it. Anu and Shiaz chose each other. Prabha did not know her husband before marrying him. Prabha may never know that mutual thrill of discovery.

Prabha’s widowed friend Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam) works as a cook at the hospital and is evicted from the apartment she has lived in for decades. Construction is everywhere, bulldozers pushing through the crowds, cranes dominating the skyline. Parvaty has no papers to prove ownership and Prabha helps the elderly woman find a lawyer. At one point, the two women engage in an act of rebellion, giggling as they throw rocks at a billboard announcing the building’s development. The billboard declares, “Class is a privilege reserved for the privileged.” Too on the nose? Have you looked at the world lately?

The three narratives are intertwined but unfold on separate tracks, creating a mosaic of life and relationships in the city. Prabha has a tender bond with Dr. Manoj (Azees Nedumangad): she encourages him to learn Hindi, he shares with her a poem he wrote for a competition. The situation is complicated. She is already “married” but essentially abandoned. Parvaty ultimately decides to move back to her seaside village, setting off the film’s final chapter, a rich tapestry of magical realism and revelation. At this point, Prabha, Anu and Parvaty feel like old friends to us. We care about what happens to them. We care about the people who care, Dr. Manoj, Shiaz.

Cinematographer Ranabir Das (who also shot “A Night of Knowing Nothing”) shows a great sensitivity to the texture of shadows, the blue of the night with fuzzy yellow lights in distant high windows, punctuating the darkness instead of stars. In a scene where the support staff are watching a training video, the light from the projector flows over their heads, but the light from the screen reflects on their faces, illuminating them but only partially. This is a good metaphor for the film itself, the way it works and the way the characters are revealed.

Kapadia has an eye for specificity, important in such a sprawling story. There is a nice shot of the housekeeping staff rushing to the roof to get the billowy sheets as a storm approaches. Prabha sits at her apartment window reading Dr. Manoj’s poem with her phone’s flashlight, all while an elevated train rattles far below in the night full of city sounds, heightening her sense of loneliness (and yet also privacy: there is nothing more intimate than reading someone else’s private writing). The rain beats against the darkened windows, the curtains and sheets flap with the gusts, and Anu and Prabha lie side by side in bed, lost in their private thoughts. Anu and Shiaz are captured by cameras above the streets, lost in the crowd, giggling together and holding hands (but only once they can’t see the hospital). It’s a fraught situation. The pair keep their interfaith relationship a secret from their families. Anu’s domineering mother sends her pictures of men on dating sites, and they look through the profile pictures, mocking their men. The film’s opening words haunt this burgeoning relationship: “Get used to impermanence.”

The seaside village of Parvaty is an oasis where the hustle and bustle of capitalism does not exist, where the air is not filled with construction and trains but with waves and wind. Anu and Prabha help Parvaty to move. A nearly drowned man (Anand Sami) washes up on the beach and Prabha saves his life with CPR. Then follows an extraordinary scene, better left to unfold, where Prabha enters another realm on another plane. What they “imagine” may not be real, but it’s just as liberating as if it were.

Kapadia’s love of cinema is evident in every frame: Chantal Akerman’s News from Home is a standout, particularly Akerman’s sense of dislocation and exile in New York City, but so is Apichatpong Weerasethakul in his whose films dissolve the boundaries of life and death. , and the night is a magical space through which messages from other dimensions can pass. The darkness in “All We Imagine as Light” isn’t dark at all. Darkness is full of light.