All We Imagine As Light: What this Cannes-nominated film can teach us about money and dreams

The former American President Obama has this film in his annual must see cinema list, Cannes Film Festival celebrates this film with a nomination to the prestigious Palme D’Or award, and numerous film festivals have celebrated the life of the two Malayali nurses working in Mumbai with awards… It used to be the BBC and other ‘foreign’ television channels that celebrated the strange joy amid poverty in India by showing BMWs and Mercedes Benz cars attempting to navigate the traffic dotted with cattle calmly sitting on the roads. That has now competition with a woman’s eye on the lives of three women which on the surface look prosaic, but when you look beyond the clutter of shared accommodations you see anticipation of tomorrow in their eyes, you begin to resonate with them and cross your fingers unconsciously and hope their dreams don’t turn out to be illusions. She has lived in a chawl for most of her life, and even though people can vouch that she is a resident, she does not have any papers to prove that the ‘kholi’ is hers. Parvati’s decision to give up on the city and go back home to the village in Ratnagiri is not an easy one and the two other protagonists of the film help her.