Short Films

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Rather Than a Great Tree, Laden With Sweet, Ripe Fruit: 17th Istanbul Biennial

A NIGHT OF KNOWING NOTHING
A NIGHT OF KNOWING NOTHING

• Director: Payal Kapadia
• FRANCE, INDIA / 2021 / DCP / Colour / 96’ / Hindi Bengali; Turkish, English s.t.

• Screenplay: Payal Kapadia, Himanshu Prajapati
• Director of Photography: Ranabir Das
• Editing: Ranabir Das
• Cast: Anlatan Narrated by: Bhumisuta Das
• Producer: Thomas Hakim, Julien Graff
• Production Co.: Petit Chaos & Another Birth
• World Sales: Square Eyes

2021 Cannes Best Documentary
2021 Lisbon&Estoril Best Film
2021 Toronto Special Mention–Amplify Voices

L, a university student in India, writes letters to her estranged lover, while he is away. Through these letters, we get a glimpse into the drastic changes taking place around her. Merging reality with fiction, dreams, memories, fantasies and anxieties, an amorphous narrative unfolds. By turns gritty and lyrical, Payal Kapadia’s A Night of Knowing Nothing (2021) is a penetrating look at the politics of education—of film education specifically—as India’s once thriving liberal public sphere yields to sectarian division and chauvinism. On a background of state-sanctioned violence and intimidation, what stands out is Kapadia’s quiet insistence on the necessity of private reflection. Resistance demands fiction, somehow, even as the failure of news media and other democratic institutions leaves no ground for a non-partisan artistic stance.

This film was a Meetings on the Bridge participant.