It sadly didn't eke its way into that stacked Best Picture category at the 2025 Oscars, but Payal Kapadia's fiction feature debut "All We Imagine as Light" bested big-budget contenders like "Wicked" and controversy-stoking titles like "Emilia Perez" as this writer's favorite film of the past year. And it's officially now available to stream via VOD and digital platforms.
Written and directed by Kapadia, "All We Imagine as Light" is centered on Prabha (played by Kani Kusruti) and Anu (Divya Prabha), two Malayali nurses living together in bustling, working-class Mumbai. Both women are dealing with complications and seeking connections in their personal lives. The more straightlaced Prabha has an estranged husband — the product of an arranged marriage — who lives in Germany and an interested doctor who works at her hospital.
Meanwhile, the younger, more carefree Anu is secretly dating a young Muslim man who her Hindu family doesn't know about and with whom she can't find any real privacy to be intimate. An unexpected trip to a seaside town, far from the sounds and lights of the capital city, may just give them the clarity and connection they've been seeking.
The radiantly relatable drama had its world premiere at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival last May — making it the first Indian film to compete in the main competition since 1994's "Swaham" — where it was nominated for the Palme d'Or and took home the Grand Prix. It also scored a Golden Globe nomination for Best Foreign Language Film as well as a Best Director nod for Kapadia.
What the critics said about 'All We Imagine as Light'
The critical response to the soul-stirring film has been equally and deservedly glowing: it boasts a rare 100% Certified Fresh rating out of 140 reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, with the site's critic consensus reading: "Capturing the here and now of modern India with the spontaneity of a candid photograph, 'All We Imagine as Light' is a lustrous achievement that announces Payal Kapadia as an essential filmmaker."
The New York Times ranked it first on its Best Movies of 2024 list, with film critic Manhola Dargis calling it a "delicate, achingly wistful story about empathy" and praising how Kapadia's documentarian eye "incorporates images of everyday people milling through the city, images that connect her characters to a sea of humanity and, by extension, to those of us watching."
How to stream 'All We Image as Light'
On Feb. 4, "All We Image as Light" dropped on digital platforms. You can rent or buy the movie on Amazon or Apple TV.
And if all of that hasn't convinced you to check out the Payal Kapadia-directed drama, here are five other top-notch new movies to stream this week.
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