In Payal Kapadia’s docu-fiction debut feature A Night of Knowing Nothing (2021), the personal and political are practically indistinguishable. The film’s text is told exclusively through voiceover and sporadic intertitles, with all of the spoken dialogue taken from found footage. An anonymous student at the prestigious Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) named L writes letters to her lover K, who has since left the school. These letters—never sent and found later in a cupboard at the FTII’s student hoste—tell of their passionate affair and L’s despair in K’s absence. The letters also detail a rapidly changing India following the ascension of right-wing Hindu nationalist Narendra Modi. L finds herself swept up in student-led activism against Modi’s authoritarian and violently casteist policies, including a 139-day strike at FTII in 2015 over the appointment of Modi allies to administrative positions. As the film unfolds in a kaleidoscopic selection of student protests, parties, and small intimate moments, L begins to reveal the ways in which her personal history and the state of the country are forever intertwined.
Kapadia—herself a graduate of FTII—tells a dense but rewarding story about the ways politics seep into every aspect of our being, especially in a moment where the grips of fascism and capitalism grow tighter by the day. The film mixes grainy black-and-white stock with found footage of student protests across India. Kapadia chooses to linger on the faces of young Indians terrified by what their country has become seemingly overnight. L’s voiceover, performed by Bhumisuta Das, intimately showcases the pain and promise of living through a moment of upheaval on both a personal and societal level. Her voice––sometimes quivering with fear, other times electrified with righteous speech—signals her shifting focus as it turns from romantic love to a deeper familial love with her fellow students and filmmakers.
What begins as a cinematic autopsy of a failed relationship morphs into a love letter to a revolution, filmmaking, and the intense relationships we form in our youth. Amid an uncertain future, Kapadia’s A Night of Knowing Nothing captures the terror and ecstacy of a person––and a country—on the brink of change.
A Night of Knowing Nothing screens February 11–17 at the Museum of Modern Art.
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