Have you ever watched a movie and been so enveloped by its world that you wanted to live in it? Indian filmmaker Payal Kapadia remembers seeing Wong Kar-wai’s “Chungking Express” as a teenager and adoring its dreamlike vibe of romantic longing so much that she wanted to hop on the next flight to Hong Kong so she could get lost wandering through the city’s neon-lit streets. “I was really into that movie,” Kapadia says. Years later, when she finally made it to the city, she went straight to Hong Kong Mansions , the sprawling shopping and restaurant complex prominently featured in Wong’s film.
And, of course, it underwhelmed. “Because how could it not?” Kapadia says, laughing. “It’s all Wong Kar-wai.
But it did make me think about subjectivity and all the feelings that can be infused into a movie’s setting to make it so much more delightful.” Kapadia took that lesson and what she learned at the Film & Television Institute of India, along with the expertise gained making two shorts and her award-winning 2021 documentary “A Night of Knowing Nothing,” and funneled it into her striking feature film debut, “All We Imagine as Light,” which opens Friday at the Laemmle Royal. The movie does for Mumbai what Wong did for Hong Kong, conjuring the precarious chaos of the city by day and the haunting stillness of its rain-soaked streets at night.
It’s centered on the friendship between three women: two roommate nurses, the serious Prabha (Kani Kusruti) and.
