Rating: NR | Runtime: 99 minutes
Release Date: February 11th, 2022 (USA) / April 13th, 2022 (France)
Studio: Norte Distribution / The Cinema Guild
Director(s): Payal Kapadia
Writer(s): Payal Kapadia & Himanshu Prajapati

What other choice did we have?

After filming tons of videos depicting their lives as students dancing and partying, the moment to figure out a narrative for it all arrived. Director Payal Kapadia and co-writer Himanshu Prajapati decided that the scenes played like memories in such a way that it felt like found footage rather than their own lives. So, they chose to tell an epistolary love story with it used as background, filling in blanks with archival video and ongoing campus protests once the political environment of India turned nationalist after Narendra Modi’s victory (think the US with Donald Trump).

The narrator is introduced as L., a woman writing to her lover now that he’s been placed in hiding by his disapproving parents due to her lower caste. What follows is a document of revolution to escape their ancestors’ mistakes.

A Night of Knowing Nothing isn’t going to be for everyone. It honestly wasn’t for me during the first half, but I stuck with it thanks to a few instances of more overt juxtapositions between sight and sound surrounding the rising political strife. Maybe I just wasn’t in the mood for esoteric metaphors as the dreamlike nature of the whole consumes all narrative, but that sense of floating through the images does eventually cease once L. realizes her writing would fall on deaf ears if she sent it. Because if her boyfriend really loved her, he would have stood up to his parents like he stood up with her during protests against the Hindu Nationalists. She knows that actions are all that matter. That equality cannot be conditional.

Kapadia’s work is formally strong with a captivatingly sensorial atmosphere, so it’s easy to see why it has found such staunch defenders with many calling it one of their favorites from 2022. It’s not too difficult to fathom someone hating it too, though, for its slow pace and essay nature. Either way, you cannot deny the impact of its message.

One moment sees someone from the Film and Television Institute of India more or less passing the torch to his students, admitting that his generation’s lack of heroes created the void that allowed Modi and the Nationalists to take control. He tells them it’s their duty to tip the scales back—to witness the injustice and bigotry and fight to eradicate it. Because authoritarianism wins the moment their rising voice goes silent.

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A Still from Payal Kapadia’s A NIGHT OF KNOWING NOTHING. Courtesy of The Cinema Guild.