We’re excited to continue FLC Luminaries, our video series that spotlights talent at all levels of the filmmaking process who uplift the art and craft of cinema. The latest features All We Imagine as Light writer and director Payal Kapadia as she discusses her unique cinematic sensibilities and the inspirations on display in her first narrative feature (which won the Grand Prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival).

The light, the lives, and the textures of contemporary, working-class Mumbai are explored and celebrated with a vivid, humane richness in Kapadia’s film. Centering on two roommates who also work together in a city hospital—head nurse Prabha (Kani Kusruti) and recent hire Anu (Divya Prabha)—and a newly retired coworker Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam), it alights on prosaic moments of connection and heartache, hope and disappointment. Prabha, her husband from an arranged marriage living in faraway Germany, is pursued by a courtly doctor; Anu carries on a romance with a Muslim man, which she must keep a secret from her 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 resort with equal radiance, articulated by her superb actors with an unforced expressivity and by the camera with a lyrical naturalism that occasionally drifts into dreamlike incandescence.

An NYFF62 Main Slate selection, All We Imagine as Light opens at Film at Lincoln Center on November 15. Get tickets here.