A hypnotic hybrid film that intertwines a love story with a portrait of contemporary India. Framed through letters from the unseen L to her estranged lover K, the film moves between intimate fragments and raw documentary footage shot by herself and filmmakers and fellow students throughout the country.
EN
“Both explicit and subtle in its invocation of great parallel cinema filmmakers like Ritwik Ghatak, Satyajit Ray, and Mrinal Sen, A Night of Knowing Nothing is far from an exercise in nostalgia. Instead, it updates those artists’ oneiric visuals and intellectual acumen to reflect on the current state of Kapadia’s home nation – specifically the obstacles faced by its youth. A film of unexpected urgency that delivers on the exhilarating potential promised by Kapadia’s breakthrough shorts, A Night of Knowing Nothing announces the arrival of an audacious cinematic talent.”
Andréa Picard
“Kapadia began shooting A Night of Knowing Nothing in the aftermath of a student strike at the FTII in 2015 (whose participants, including Kapadia, continue to face legal blowback) against the Narendra Modi government’s appointment of a TV actor and right-wing politician as the university’s new chairman. But the film eventually expanded to trace the wave of movements that have erupted across universities in India throughout the last five years, protesting a series of political assaults: fee hikes, privatization, censorship, Islamophobia, caste discrimination. The result is as much an elegy to the utopian promise of public education in India as an interrogation of the public responsibility of the artist. What does it mean to create in the face of destruction? To preoccupy oneself with matters of beauty in the face of rampant ugliness? The false dichotomy at the heart of these questions, separating aesthetics and politics, comes undone in A Night of Knowing Nothing. Here, beauty emerges as its own form of resistance, and resistance emerges as a thing of beauty – a site of creative reimagination. Kapadia’s textured use of darkness and light, and particularly her inspired play with non-diegetic sound, give form to the feeling of protest, to the energies that bind together disparate individuals in acts of collective articulation.
Devika Girish1
Devika Girish: What I love about A Night of Knowing Nothing is that you’ve contrived a specific cinematic language for protest. There are all these vérité scenes of protest, but the way you treat that footage visually and sonically emphasizes the emotional undercurrents – the grief, the rage, the joy, all of that.
Payal Kapadia: I didn’t make overtly political films before this. I made quiet, slow films. I think that sensibility stayed on in A Night of Knowing Nothing. I always knew I didn’t want to make a film that was chronological. I was trying to articulate how, in the last five years, it’s been really emotional. We’ve seen one thing happening after another, horrific images that have been coming to us, whether on Facebook or in front of our eyes. I didn’t think I could approach any of that without emotion. I also wanted to build the film such that the scenes at the end [of police crackdowns on students] are experienced in a way that doesn’t feel like it’s happening someplace else, in some other time, but that there’s a connection to these people, an empathy and affection.
Payal Kapadia in conversation with Devika Girish2
- 1Devika Girish, “Interview: Payal Kapadia on A Night of Knowing Nothing,” Film Comment, 28 February 2022.
- 2Devika Girish, “Interview: Payal Kapadia on A Night of Knowing Nothing,” Film Comment, 28 February 2022.
