Bodies sway to a beat we cannot hear. Instead a hushed, disembodied voice (Bhumisuta Das) murmurs over flickering black and white images that look soft to the touch, like a love letter turned velvety with repeated reading. A film is being projected behind the dancers. Sometimes one of them will strut into the beam and become, for a moment, a part of the screen. Other times little dramas — embraces or arguments — occur. But mostly there’s just mute, almost ghostly movement, silhouetted and shadowy: Only a few seconds into Payal Kapadia’s shimmery, poetic essay doc “A Night of Knowing Nothing,” it feels like we are a few hours deep into the excavation of someone else’s memories.
Kapadia’s film was shot during her time at the Film and Television Institute of India (Ftii), and it is unusually interested in mulling over the role that third-level institutions can play...
Kapadia’s film was shot during her time at the Film and Television Institute of India (Ftii), and it is unusually interested in mulling over the role that third-level institutions can play...
- 4/4/2022
- by Jessica Kiang
- Variety Film + TV
, Payal Kapadia’s feature debut “A Night of Knowing Nothing” is composed of archival footage, student chronicles of contemporary protests, and letters whispered aloud to an absent lover. Co-written by Kapadia and Himanshu Prajapati, its fictitious framing device — a box discovered in a room at the Film and Television Institute of India (Ftii), containing lost film reels and a diary written by a student known only as “L” — creates several floating layers of dramatic reality, which gently fall atop each other to create a vivid portrait of revolt and oppression, love and pain, and philosophical thought threatened by nationalist agenda.
The central thesis of this New York Film Festival Currents selection can be boiled down to a single question: What is the purpose of a university in modern India? However, its approach to this seemingly simple idea is boldly multifaceted, from its ghostly depiction of young love that blossoms in...
The central thesis of this New York Film Festival Currents selection can be boiled down to a single question: What is the purpose of a university in modern India? However, its approach to this seemingly simple idea is boldly multifaceted, from its ghostly depiction of young love that blossoms in...
- 10/4/2021
- by Siddhant Adlakha
- Indiewire
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