Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Film myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.Little in life is as beautiful as the city by night. Just ask All We Imagine As Light. In this luminous breakthrough from Indian director Payal Kapadia, the backdrop is Mumbai, rhapsodic under blue-black skies. Streets pulse, trains glow. “Evenings are my favourite time of day,” a voice remarks. “In Mumbai, it feels like the day has just begun.”Yet one of the intriguing things about this poised drama is that the first major character is exhausted by evening. She is Prabha (Kani Kusruti), a hospital nurse both mournful and steely. But then, the whole film is subtly double-edged. One moment, Mumbai can feel like any other urban centre, all blank commuters and hanging cranes; the next, uniquely itself, with heat and rain as supporting characters. Kapadia’s film won the Grand Prix at Cannes, and comes with classical arthouse flourishes: shades of 1950s Neo-Realism and 1960s New Wave. It also feels distinctly modern, popping with deep colour. The mood is melancholy: Prabha’s husband has left her for Europe. Then it turns airy and jazzy.Some of that energy comes from a second female lead: brash hospital receptionist Anu (Divya Prabha), who is also Prabha’s younger roommate. We first meet her telling a patient the state now offers 1,000 rupees and a bucket to any man willing to have a vasectomy. That detail sticks in the mind — but the vivid sense of character is more striking still. The film needs only tiny moments to bring alive Anu, the haunted Prabha and their semi-friendship, making them our focus even as it reminds us the city is home to endless other characters.To underscore that, the voices of actual Mumbaikars sometimes overlay the scenes on screen, discussing what brought them here. (Typically, economics or heartbreak.) But the story too is rooted in the real. Anu has a secret Muslim boyfriend, perilous in contemporary India, while property developers upend a third heroine, hospital cook Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam). Her part in the film finally nudges it out of Mumbai, into coastal country. What follows is still compelling, but two-sided again: you realise why people leave the city, and why they long to get back there.★★★★☆In UK cinemas from November 29 and in US cinemas now
