Written by Kapadia, the film follows the lives of two nurses from Kerala ? Prabha (Kani Kusruti) and Anu (Divyaprabha) ? who work at a Mumbai hospital and share a flat. Prabha’s routine is upset when she receives an unexpected gift from her estranged husband. In the space-crunched city, her younger roommate Anu tries in vain to find a spot to be intimate with her boyfriend. “A trip to a beach town allows them to find a space for their desires to manifest,” reads the movie’s synopsis.

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During their initial meetings with Kapadia, both Kusruti and Divyaprabha had auditioned for the role that the other one ended up essaying. Kusruti was initially supposed to play Anu while Divyaprabha auditioned for Prabha. “When we first met Payal, I was around 31 and was supposed to play Anu, who is in her mid-20s,” recalls Kusruti, who has acted in several talked-about Malayalam movies such as Kerala Cafe (2009), Biriyaani (2020) and Pada (2022). Since Kapadia got busy with other projects and considerable time passed, the project demanded certain changes.

In 2017, Kapadia’s short Afternoon Clouds featured in the Cinefondation section of the festival. Four years later, A Night of Knowing Nothing won the Oeil d’Or (Golden Eye) Award for Best Documentary Film at Cannes. Establishing her style of poetic storytelling, Afternoon Clouds captures a day in the life of 70-year-old widow Kati and her Nepali maid Mati. A Night of Knowing Nothing, designed as an epistolary romance, merges reality and fiction, with student protests unfolding in the background.

By the time Kapadia started working on filming All We Imagine As Light, Kusruti was 38 and thought she should play the older character. Kusruti auditioned again and was finally chosen for the role of Prabha. Divyaprabha, who during her decade-long career has worked primarily in Tamil and Malayalam films, got a call for an audition from Kapadia’s team following the release of the Malayalam-language Ariyippu (2022). Her response to the script, when she first read it, was not very different from that of Kusruti’s. “I was moved by it. I even cried while reading some of the scenes. I did the first round of auditions in Kochi for the character Prabha.” For the second round, Divyaprabha came to Mumbai and stayed with Kapadia for a couple of days. After she auditioned for Prabha, Kapadia asked her to do Anu’s scenes as well. Eventually, she was cast as Anu. The cast of this Malayalam-Hindi film also features Chhaya Kadam, Hridhu Haroon and Azees Nedumangad.

Prepping for the film, according to Kasruti, was as “enjoyable as working on a theatre production”. The actor says: “With Payal, I felt the process was as or more interesting than the shoot. In terms of the process, this is one of the best experiences of my career. As an actor, I have never worked on a set where I felt completely involved.”

Both Kasruti and Divyaprabha call Kapadia an “inclusive” director. “Payal made all of us feel that it is our film. She has a clear idea about what she wants as a director. Yet, she is open to suggestions,” says Kusruti, who appeared this year in Killer Soup as an accountant with mean Kalaripayattu moves and Poacher as a tough forest officer. In Girls Will Be Girls, which premiered at Sundance Film Festival 2024, she plays the role of a complex but protective mother.

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Offering an insight into their extensive preparation, Divyaprabha says every aspect of a scene was explored in detail and recorded during their workshop. “Payal was very involved in the workshops and rehearsals. Much ahead of the shoot, we rehearsed every scene. If she was not convinced about how we acted in a particular scene during the shoot, she used to show us the recording from the workshop. My ability to recreate a scene increased after this experience.” Though the film was shot over 40 days, she worked on it from May to November last year, adds the 32-year-old actor. Divyaprabha has acted in several acclaimed Malayalam movies such as Take Off (2017), Malik (2021) and Family (2023).

The shooting mainly took place in Dahisar, located on the outskirts of Mumbai, and Ratnagiri, a coastal district of Maharashtra . While the location in Dahisar, a hospital, was an enclosed space, Ratnagiri was open. As they wanted to record sync sound, the windows at the hospital were shut and the fans were switched off. Kusruti has a “unique memory” of shooting there. “Sometimes, we shot through the night. We used to sleep during the day. At times, I lost the sense of whether it’s daytime or night,” says Kusruti and calls the experience of shooting in Ratnagiri “calming”. “Everything there was beautiful in Ratnagiri ? where we stayed and shot. It was challenging but a great learning experience. There was a snake in the house we were shooting and another was spotted when Divya was shooting in a cave,” says Kusruti.

Even as both leading ladies are looking forward to their visit to the French Riviera, they make it clear that their “priority” is not the “red-carpet look”. Kusruti is currently in the midst of a hectic shoot in Kerala but her team has given her time off to attend the premiere of All We Imagine as Light. Divyaprabha has already received the schedule for their three-day visit. That has come with a nudge to look “fabulous”. While Divyaprabha is still wondering how to crack that, she is mainly leaning on Indian designers for it.