Payal Kapadia’s eloquent fiction debut follows three women attempting to find a place in modern Mumbai.

All cities are crossroads, transitory beacons of artificial light which attract visitors and those who stay forever but who will always remain visitors. Mumbai is its own special case; something that Payal Kapadia pleads in her fiction debut – the first Indian film in Cannes Competition in three decades. It’s a light for audiences to surrender to, a realist-infused story of three women broadly representing three generations in a city where their hold is fragile, where their breaths barely leave a mist of a trace. This fiction debut from a talented documentarian brings to mind the work of Lucrecia Martel or Alice Rohrwacher, yet there’s a strong romantic streak that also calls to mind Wong Kar-wai’s great love affair with the city of Hong Kong.

Fionnuala Halligan, Screen International