Behind the Screen: All We Imagine as Light
When:
Sunday, Feb 09, 2025 3:30p -
6:30p
Sunday, Feb 09, 2025 3:30p -
6:30p
Where:
West Newton Cinema
1296 Washington Street
Newton, MA 02468
Admission:
$20
Hosted by:
Categories:
Movies
Event website:
https://www.westnewtoncinema.com/movie/behind-the-screen-all-we-imagine-as-light
Behind the Screen: All We Imagine as Light
Directed by Payal Kapadia, this revelatory fiction feature debut—winner of the Grand Prize at Cannes—spotlights the lives of three women navigating work and home in contemporary, working-class Mumbai. Head nurse Prabha (Kani Kusruti), her new coworker Anu (Divya Prabha), and cook Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam) share moments of connection, heartache, and hope in a bustling city hospital and beyond. Depicting both the metropolitan rush and the serenity of a coastal village, Kapadia’s camera lingers with lyrical naturalism, revealing how the transformative powers of friendship and sisterhood illuminate unexpected corners of everyday life.
About the Speakers
- Priya Giri Desai is a producer and writer whose two-decade career includes work for LIFE magazine, PBS, and independent film projects such as Unnatural Causes, Enlighten Up!, and Forgotten Ellis Island. She earned an Emmy nomination for her work as producer and writer on PBS Kids’ Postcards From Buster. Priya graduated from Duke University with a degree in Comparative Area Studies focusing on South Asia and is a founding board member of The India Center Foundation.
- Sarah Pinto is a scholar of medical histories and cultures, focusing on how gender, kinship, caste, law, and everyday life intersect with medicine in South Asia. Her research explores how knowledge about bodies and minds moves across time and place, illuminating colonial and postcolonial scientific imaginations. She has examined subjects such as psychiatric care, childbirth and reproductive health among Dalit women in Uttar Pradesh India, and the history of psychiatry and psychoanalysis in South Asia. Sarah earned her BA from Bryn Mawr College and her MA and PhD from Princeton University.
- Smitha Radhakrishnan, a professor of sociology at Wellesley College, researches the everyday lives of women in India through ethnography and interviews, focusing on how especially marginalized women manage work, debt, and care. Her book, Making Women Pay: Microfinance in Urban India, received the 2023 Honorable Mention from the ASA Sex and Gender Section and the 2024 Alice Amsden Distinguished Book Honorable Mention. She holds a B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley.
Moderated By:
- Erin Trahan is a filmmaker, reporter, critic, and educator specializing in independent film. She has been a regular contributor to WBUR for more than a decade and recently released a short documentary about Massachusetts’ longest-serving governor, “Dukakis: Recipe for Democracy,” which will screen at the West Newton on March 26, 2025.
