A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Wednesday, March 19, 2025

All We Imagine as Light (Payal Kapadia, 2024)

Kani Kusruti and Divya Prabha in All We Imagine as Light

Cast: Kani Kusruti, Divya Prabha, Chhaya Kadam, Hridhu Haroon, Azees Nedumangad, Anand Sami. Screenplay: Payal Kapadia, Himanshu Prajapati, Robin Joy, Naseem Azad. Cinematography: Ranabir Das. Production design: Piyusha Chalke, Shamim Khan, Yashasvi Sabharwal. Film editing: Clément Pinteaux. Music: Topshe. 

In a film at once delicate and gritty, Payal Kapadia paints a picture of urban loneliness in the lives of three women. Prabha (Kani Kusruti), a nurse in a Mumbai hospital, hasn't seen or heard from her husband for a year since he left to work in Germany. Anu (Divya Prabha), her younger roommate and fellow nurse, is under pressure from her family to accept an arranged marriage like Prabha's, but she's in love with a young Muslim, Shiaz (Hridhu Haroon). Their friend Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam), a cook at the hospital, is being evicted from the apartment she shared with her late husband by the construction company that wants to tear it down. When they leave the teeming city to help Parvaty move to the village where she once lived, each of them begins to confront their emotional isolation. Kapaia's film deservedly won the Grand Prix at Cannes, but it failed to attract Oscar nominations, in part because it was produced by an international consortium of companies and the Indian film industry failed to submit it for the awards. 

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