One of the hardest things about MIFF is staying confident with the films that you have chosen.

You make your best guess at what films you think you will like, for me based on subject matter – is it about women or made by women – or the country it comes from – I particularly like Iranian, Eastern European, South American films. I tend to avoid the American films that have well-known actors in them as it is quite likely that they will get a release at the cinema or on streaming.

And then once the festival starts, you start talking to people you know in the spaces between films and begin to doubt your choices. You will chat to someone whose opinion your trust and they will tell you that particular film you were looking forward to seeing was not actually that great. All We Imagine as Light was one of those.

It was the first Indian film screened in competition at Cannes in 30 years, which was enough to make me want to see it. A friend, though, said it was long, slow and meandering and that they introduced a new character 10 minutes before the end, which is a bit of a narrative no no. I nearly swapped out of this film because of that feedback but there was nothing else on that I wanted to see and so I stuck with it. I’m glad that I did.

Yes, it was slow. Yes it was meandering but in an almost dreamlike way. And I’m not sure I agree that they introduced a new character just before the end. There is a character, but he ends up being a dreamlike version of someone else which seemed quite fitting with the narrative.

We are dropped into the busy streets of Mumbai with some exposition around how it is called the city of dreams but it’s actually a city of illusions as things are not what they seem.  Everyone has someone in their family in Mumbai trying to find a better future.

We see the interconnecting stories of three nurses working at the same hospital. They could represent three generations of women, Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam) is older and a widow. Because her husband didn’t have the right papers before he died, she is unable to stop developers evicting her without compensation from her home of 22 years.

Prabha (Kani Kusruti) is also married but it was an arranged one and her husband went over to Germany straight after their wedding and she hasn’t seen him since. She is being courted by a doctor who works at the hospital but you can see she is caught in something of a limbo where she wants to be married to her husband but feels he has abandoned her.

And the young generation is Anu (Divya Prabha), who has her hair cut short and is secretly dating a Muslim boy called Shiaz (Hridhu Haroon). Her parents are trying to arrange a marriage for her and she doesn’t understand why she can’t do as she pleases. 

We spent two hours in an almost dreamlike narrative with these three women. There is little tension, lots of pauses before words, and beautiful imagery first of Mumbai at night, full of bustle and colour, and then a rural beachside town when Parvaty returns to her home village, that is windswept and has a sense of wildness and freedom. I felt I was missing some cultural nuances, for example it’s clear that some people are speaking different languages (Prabha’s doctor beau/creeper is trying to improve his Hindi) but I’m not sure what this signified in terms of cultural appropriateness, religion and class.

The slow pace won’t be for everyone and although there are messages there about how women are let down by men, about the choices that are taken from them and what they do to compensate, there are no strong messages that I could determine. It’s a mood.