All We Imagine as Light focuses on the lives of three women in contemporary Mumbai; as shown by director Payal Kapadia, the city is arguably the film’s fourth major character. Kapadia eschews convention, her metropolis painted in muted colours with dark skies and heavy rain a constant.
Held up by the censors in India though screened at Cannes and nominated for an International Oscar, Sandhya Suri’s 2024 film Santosh serves as a bookend to Payal Kapadia’s poignant All We Imagine As Light, about women in Mumbai experiencing less hassled lives outside the city. Suri’s heroine moves in the reverse direction.
Radhika Apte has been acclaimed for her ebullient performance as a reluctant bride in Sister Midnight since director Karan Kandhari’s comic horror movie was launched at Cannes last May.
Marriage is not often presented in cinema as a bowl of mangoes, but it’s rarely shown as so morbidly strange as in this reckless corker of a debut feature written and directed by Karan Kandhari, and backed by Film4.
Chapter III: We Return to Light is an unashamedly gentle and soothing escape from a hectic world. The last in a travelogue triptych which has so far incorporated Anoushka Shankar’s influences from living in Europe and then California – this album returns to the source of her music and inspiration.
The railways that we built in India may be well known, but I bet you’ve never heard of the Customs Line, a hedge that stretched 2,500 miles across the subcontinent all the way from the River Indus to the border between Madras and Bengal – the distance between London and Istanbul. Comparable in scale to the great Wall of China, this 40-foot high barrier was created to prevent the smuggling of salt.
Once again, Glasgow’s annual winter festival of traditional music from all parts of the world is formed of an astonishingly packed programme of music, dance, trails and poetry in venues throughout the city. This year’s opening weekend saw two distinctly different orchestral concerts, each pushing the boundaries of what an orchestra can be.
If you suffer from lepidopterophobia, this film will either cure your fear of moths or push you over the edge. Warning: the screen is often filled with moths of every shape, size, colour and pattern while the sound of flapping, fluttering and girating wings fills the air to the point where you feel bombarded by the flying, furry creatures.
“Shoot, Jim, shooot!” Simon Callow does a fine impression of producer Ismail Merchant desperately trying to get director James Ivory to bring urgency to the proceedings.
The received wisdom was that Ismael thought Jim was going to bankrupt Merchant Ivory Productions commercially by insisting on perfection, while Jim was sure that Ismael would bankrupt it artistically by insisting on every possible economy.
Payal Kapadia’s lyrical fiction feature debut All We Imagine as Light, which received the Grand Prix at Cannes in May, is now accruing end-of-year prizes. This week, the New York Film Critics Circle and the voters for the Gotham Awards (which honours independent movies) named it 2024’s Best International Film. More prizes will follow.