This is what Edward Yang was talking about when he wrote, “we live three times as long since man invented movies”. Last night I got to be on the streets of Mumbai, watch a young Hindu nurse dress in a burka to infiltrate the neighborhood of the Muslim man she loves, I traveled to a beach side village of another woman as she tried to figure out the next chapter of her life, and so much more. A slice of another existence, both drifting and natural at the same time, given to me by a filmmaker full of grace and kindness. A little extra understanding to bind us all. I enjoyed Payal Kapadia's dreamy romantic and politically righteous documentary, A…

There’s a scene in the middle of the first hour where Prabha (Kani Kusruti) and Anu (Divya Prabha) have a conversation inside their small house, ubiquitous in the city of Bombay, but Payal Kapadia and cinematographer Ranabir Das’ camera leaves them to themselves and instead roams the city. The camera lingers from the skyline on neighbouring buildings with their lit apartments, wide shots of the city with the metro trailing between buildings like a snake making its path through a dense forest floor. In a crowded city like Bombay, one where anyone can be anonymous, anyone can disappear in a crowd, where one can be rendered a non-person if they don’t have their papers, Kapadia distills the idea that it’s…