A Night Of Knowing Nothing

One of the year’s most electrifying debuts — and winner of the best documentary award at Cannes 2021 — A Night of Knowing Nothing is an inventive and deeply felt portrait of contemporary Indian youth on the shores of love, art and politics. Structured around letters from an unseen university student, L, to her estranged lover, K, Payal Kapadia’s hybrid film is at once grand and contained. It weaves fragments of a romance and moments of domestic life with handheld documentary footage captured around the country over several years. Merging reality with fiction, dreams, memories, fantasies and anxieties, Kapadia creates a bold cinematic work which celebrates the ways in which our lives and loves forever intertwine with the political insistence on a new world order.