Bold and distinctive, acclaimed shorts filmmaker Payal Kapadia’s electrifying feature debut – winner of the Golden Eye for Best Documentary at Cannes 2021 – is an immersive and spiritual work.
Beginning with a found object, a box of clippings and letters from a Mumbai film student to her forbidden lover, A Night of Knowing Nothing explores the political climate of contemporary India and the intimacy of its effects on the country’s youth.
Shot by the filmmakers and fellow students throughout India, Kapadia – an alumna of the Film & Television Institute of India – charts the fractious relationship between a nation’s youth, its rigid caste structures, its families and its current nationalist government. At once grand and contained, A Night of Knowing Nothing is poetic and dream-like, an experimental collage of romance, moments of domestic life, exuberant celebrations, and intense demonstrations, making up a portrait of contemporary India, its youth and their activism, while in its lush textures and imagery, also writing a love letter to cinema itself.
