Kapadia’s extensive knowledge of cinema should come as no surprise. In a recent interview with IndieWire’s Anne Thompson, the auteur explained that years of following the arthouse and festival ecosystem helped her cast the film’s two leads, Divya Prabha and Kani Kusruti.

Kapadia’s first fully narrative film, “All We Imagine as Light,” begins more like a documentary, surveying Mumbai, particularly at night, before gently gravitating toward three women, all of them hospital workers, who are juggling their workaday realities, and those of India’s stratified society, with their own aspirations.