Fiction moves stealthily through Payal Kapadia's films.

The Indian filmmaker's first movie, "Night of Knowing Nothing," is a documentary about the student strike at the Film and Television Institute of India, Kapadia's alma mater, following the appointment by Prime Minister Narendra Modi of a right-wing chairman. The film, though, is threaded through with fictional letters between two students who have split because they belong to separate castes.

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.

"Real life is more interesting than cinema can be. We just have to pick its fruits," Kapadia says, smiling. "There's a quote from Rilke that I really love: 'If your real life is poor, it means you are not poet enough to draw from its riches.'"

"All We Imagine as Light," which opened Friday (11/15) in theaters and expands in the coming weeks, is about as rich a movie experience as you'll find this year. The film, which won the Grand Prix (second prize) at the Cannes Film Festival, is an intoxicatingly atmospheric portrait of life in Mumbai — of its dreams, its illusions and its impossibilities.

As "All We Imagine as Light" moves along, it slowly accumulates the magic of fable. Prabha (Kani Kusruti) hasn't heard from her husband, who's working in Germany, in years. Anu (Divya Prabha) is in love with a Muslim man, a relationship they have to hide and that, probably, is doomed. Their slightly older, recently widowed colleague, Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam), is being evicted... Read More