The light, the lives, and the textures of contemporary, working-class Mumbai are explored and celebrated by writer/director Payal Kapadia, who won the Grand Prize at this year's Cannes Film Festival for her revelatory fiction feature debut.
Centring on two roommates who also work together in a city hospital - head nurse Prabha (Kani Kusruti) and recent hire Anu (Divya Prabha) - plus their co-worker, cook Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam), Kapadia's film alights on moments of connection and heartache, hope and disappointment.
Prabha, her husband from an arranged marriage living in faraway Germany, is courted by a doctor at her hospital; Anu carries on a romance with a Muslim man, which she must keep a secret from her strict Hindu family; Parvaty finds herself dealing with a sudden eviction from her apartment. Kapadia captures the bustle of the metropolis and the open-air tranquillity of a seaside village with equal radiance, articulated by her superb actresses and by the camera with a lyrical naturalism that occasionally drifts into dreamlike incandescence.
In cinemas from Boxing Day.