After a trying few days at work, what a joy it was to see All We Imagine as Light, Payal Kapadia’s utterly gorgeous film about three women dealing with the travails of life in modern Mumbai. Kapadia, a documentary maker, brings the same patient observant eye to her narrative, giving her characters time and space to fully inhabit the screen. Amid an excellent cast, the marvellous Kani Kusruti gives a performance of extraordinary soul and depth, telling most of the story with her luminous eyes and hauntingly beautiful face. Kusruti plays Prabha, a middle-aged nurse whose long-absent husband has abandoned her to a lonely widow-like state. Quiet, reserved and deeply lonely, her kindness and comion is expressed largely through her work, and (like Maggie Cheung in In the Mood for Love”), she fights against her instincts to fall in love with a handsome doctor. Prabha’s younger flatmate Anu (Divya Prabha), has her own romantic difficulties, having fallen in love with a Muslim man (Hridhu Haroon) while her mother sends her marriage offers from Hindu men. Meanwhile, Prabha’s older friend Parvaty is evicted from her home by developers building luxury apartments in the neighbourhood. This deceptively simple narrative is full to bursting with observations about generational divides, gender roles, religious tolerance and the intransigence of city life, though never feels didactic or heavy-handed, remaining a character-driven story. It’s also a love letter to Mumbai, a city I’ve not visited since 2004, and captured here by cinematographer Ranabir Das and editor Clément Pinteaux in all its bustling and bedraggled beauty. Kapadia won the Grand Prix at this year’s Cannes Festival, and in any other year could easily have won the top prize. How lovely to get to see it on the big screen, in the cozy surroundings of the Curzon Mayfair, still my favourite London cinema after all these years.