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