A Night of Knowing Nothing

Getting to Know Our Asian Neighbors Through Good Films: India
Online Screening #5
Streaming Period: 12/20/2024 @0:00 – 12/26/2024 @23:59
Teket: Viewing will end when the streaming ends. Vimeo OTT: You will have 72 hrs to finish if you purchase and start viewing before the streaming period ends.

Director: Payal Kapadia | India, France | 2021 |101 min | poetic, hybrid documentary | in Hindi　and Bengali, with English and Japanese Subtitles (not SDH) | TIcket: 1100 yen

Payal Kapadia’s feature debut, A Night of Knowing Nothing (2021), is at once a political chronicle of contemporary India, an ode to the intimate struggles of love, and a love letter to cinema. Winner of the Best Documentary award at Cannes, the film radically blurs the lines between fiction and documentary by using an epistolary narrative structure interspersed with multiple genres of staged and documentary footage, animation, news reportage, and home movies. In its promiscuous crossing of genre-boundaries and its critical citational ethics, A Night of Knowing Nothing does more than simply mobilize archive effects: it collates its own archive of loss and longing, resistance and repair.

“Eisenstein, Pudovkin! We shall fight, we shall win!”
—slogan at student strike, Pune, India, 2015

(From Film Quarterly)

Cannes Film Festival Golden Eye Award (L’Œil d’or, the Best Documentary Award)
Toronto International Film Festival 2021, Amplify Voices Award
Busan International Film festival 2021, Cinephile Award
Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival 2023, Robert Flaherty Award (the top award)

Director Payal Kapadia has just won the Grand Prix at Cannes 2024 for her next film All We Imagine as Light (a drama feature). You can see the same poetic storytelling with fragile beauty in A Night of Knowing Nothing.