Courtesy of Sideshow/Janus Films

The Santa Barbara International Film Festival (SBIFF) hosted a pre-release screening of Cannes Grand Prix winner “All We Imagine as Light” at the Riviera Theatre, followed by an interview with writer and director Payal Kapadia on Oct. 13. The film is slated to release in New York and Los Angeles on Nov. 15.

“All We Imagine as Light,” the first Indian film to win the Grand Prix at Cannes, follows two Malayali women who work as nurses at a hospital in Mumbai: Prabha (Kani Kusruti) and Anu (Divya Prabha). Although Hindi and Marathi — the principal languages of Mumbai — are heard in the film, the dialogue is mostly in Malayalam. Prabha is married, but her husband works in Germany and no longer calls her. Anu resists her parents’ pressure to marry, while secretly dating Shiaz (Hridhu Haroon).

Kapadia’s background as a documentary filmmaker is evident, especially in the first half of the movie, which is bookended by montages of street scenes in Mumbai before shifting to a seaside village. Voiceovers of women speaking about their lives in the city in various languages — Gujarati, Bhojpuri, Bengali, Malayalam — clash with electronic music and diegetic sound.

In between, the challenges of city life come to the fore. Anu struggles to pay rent, and Prabha’s older friend, Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam), faces eviction from the apartment where she’s lived for 22 years. Dr. Manoj (Azees Nedumangad) confides to Prabha in Malayalam that he struggles to speak Hindi. Anu and Shiaz seek a private place for intimacy, but they are thwarted repeatedly by the monsoon rains, which cause delays on the metro and leaks in Anu’s apartment. All of the characters question their future as life in the city wears them down.

Apart from the practical and material difficulties that the protagonists encounter, the women also face emotional quandaries. Prabha wrestles with contradictory feelings about her husband, who sends her a fancy rice-cooker even as he ceases to maintain contact with her; she also has to contend with romantic advances from another man. Meanwhile, tensions mount between the more subdued and judgmental Prabha, and the more exuberant, carefree Anu.

The women, especially Prabha, are portrayed with mundane, yet intimate physicality. One of the most striking scenes in the film occurs when Prabha goes to the kitchen in the middle of the night, hugging and crouching over the rice cooker her husband sent. At other points, Anu is shown changing, and Prabha is shown squatting to defecate, but this intimacy is not erotic, serving rather as a window into the banal aspects of their lives.

Throughout the opening hour or so, which spans several days in the plot, the camerawork concentrates on the cityscape, especially the metro, depicting high-rise buildings through the trains’ windows and vice versa. In several scenes, the camera shows the view out the window while characters are speaking to each other indoors, off screen. The color palette is dominated by black, blues and grays.

Around the midpoint of the film, the women travel to a fishing village on the Arabian Sea, and the progression of time in the story slows. In the village, the characters confront questions of how to proceed with their lives — for Parvaty, where to live; for Prabha, how to feel about her husband’s silence; for Anu, what future she can envision with Shiaz. As they do, they draw closer together, and the color palette shifts predominantly to brown, green and yellow.

Although the protagonists grapple with issues that are common to many people in urban India (and around the world), “All We Imagine as Light” is not so much about or against these problems, as it is about how its leading women live with them.

After the film, which runs for 118 minutes, SBIFF Director Roger Durling interviewed Kapadia on stage.

Durling asked Kapadia to explain her decision to vary the setting and pacing between the first and second halves of the film.

“I felt that this sweaty, tropical feeling of the monsoon worked well with the themes of the first part of the film, in the mise-en-scène, because there’s a feeling that everybody’s stuck in these not-very-nice situations.” Kapadia said.

In contrast, Kapadia said she had striven to make the second half more like a “folk tale.”

“I wanted the second part to have this bright sunlight – sometimes so bright that it’s bleached out, almost – and to give a different feeling to the characters in the film, which perhaps leads to [something] more like an afternoon dream,” Kapadia said.

Durling also asked Kapadia about the influence of her documentary filmmaking background on “All We Imagine as Light,” which is her first fictional feature film.

“I love cinema that have a hybrid feeling to them, because the juxtaposition of reality or ‘vérité’ style with fiction – somehow, for me, this montage creates the possibility of another truth,” Kapadia said.

Kapadia then paid tribute to cinematic influences including the cinéma vérité documentary-making movement, the city symphony genre and the French New Wave.

“I was very inspired by the film of Agnès Varda, ‘Cléo from 5 to 7,’” Kapadia said. “The French New Wave had this quality of being on the streets and having the actors walk around as if they were part of this mise-en-scène of reality. I was very inspired by that, to see how to put a fiction within reality.”

Kapadia later elaborated on her decision to focus on trains and windows in the film.

“If you live in Mumbai, you spend a lot of time in the train,” Kapadia said. “You end up going up and down a lot, and you pass by the city, and I was interested in looking at a sense of the architecture from the window, because it tells you a lot about the geography and class dynamics of the city.”

Durling also asked Kapadia about the technical challenges of the filming process.

“It’s really expensive, very difficult to get a whole street to shoot; to recreate that would be impossible,” Kapadia said. “What we decided was that we would shoot with a DSLR, very documentary-style, and I think that went with what I was going for with the ‘vérité’ in the first place.”

Kapadia said that the film had taken her five to six years to write, and that her perspectives on the characters had shifted over time.

“When I started writing the film, Kani [Kusruti] was supposed to play the younger nurse,” Kapadia said. “I think we all grew with the characters over so many years.”

Durling concluded by expressing admiration for Kapadia, who has been named to the Time 100 Next list.

“You are the future of cinema. I just cannot wait to see what you do next,” Durling said.