TRIPLE FEATURE 03: All We Imagine as Light

something watch / eat / read

Jul 25, 2025

A movie, a restaurant, and a poem. Earlier installments here and here.

ALL WE IMAGINE AS LIGHT

Payal Kapadia, 2024

Prabha is a nurse living and working in a new city. She has a crush on someone and it’s reciprocated, but she also has an estranged husband who has ghosted her across international borders. Her younger roommate and coworker Anu is sneaking around with her boyfriend because their differing religious backgrounds complicate matters. And their older coworker Parvaty is in the midst of being displaced from her home by luxury condo goons.

Viewed by many as the best film of last year, Kapadia’s film about three working class women, all transplants trying to make a life in Mumbai, diffuses a story onto the screen rather than dictate one like steam curling from a kitchen window or that transitional moment when a someone brushes your arm and you’re not sure if it was accidental or a clue. With a documentarian’s eye for texture and a poet’s instinct for when to let silence (or rather, wordlessness) do the heavy lifting, Kapadia crafts a movie with an alertness to grief and class tension. She lingers on the lyricism of quotidian moments—a foot nudging a cat off the bed, hands touching on a public—and draws upon an ocean-blue palette and the twinkling piano of an Ethiopian nun and originals by Topshe. The result is a poignant counterpoint to the more familiar and frantic portrayals of urban strife and survival.

Scenes may seem fragmentary, and yet the emotional logic is never in doubt. We witness for example, loneliness can take root in the body, and how women learn to survive by making quiet space for each other and how. Prabha curls herself around a rice cooker, sent by her husband in Germany, in a posture so intimate it reads as both absurd and deeply moving. I wanted to write about this in time for the film’s screening at BAM as part of the rice-cooker series earlier this month but fortunately for all the movie is online!

Stream on Criterion Channel or buy the DVD.

RAIN AT THREE

by Tishane Doshi

CHATTI BY REGI MATHEW

W 37th St, New York, NY

The humble rice cooker takes center stage in All We Can Imagine as Light, but another dish quietly commands attention: fish curry in the Keralite style ,which Prabha prepares and offers to Anu as a kind of edible apology. Their hometown sits miles away on India’s southern coast, and the gesture lands with warmth and familiarity.

I clung to the scene at least in part because I’d been meaning to explore the restaurants near Floral Park offering dishes from the region that Robert Sietsema had previously written up. Fortunately Chatti opened in Midtown, which is much closer.

Unlike anything I’d eaten before, the fish curry ended up being our favorite dish of the night. It had an eternal smokiness and sourness from the blackened Malabar tamarind, and the clay pot in which it’s fermented.

Here’s the full run down of what else I ate.

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