Harpur Cinema Presents: A Night of Knowing Nothing
Payal Kapadia, India and France, 2021 96 min
Friday, March 25 and Sunday, March 27: Lecture Hall 6, 7:30 PM. Doors open at 7:00 pm. $4 single Admission.
Face masks are required of all attendees, regardless of vaccination status, in accordance with University public health policies. All University public health policies will be enforced.
One of the year’s most electrifying debuts—and winner of the best documentary award at Cannes—Payal Kapadia’s hybrid feature A Night of Knowing Nothing is a fever dream of impossible love tied to a broader reflection on contemporary India. Structured around letters from an unseen protagonist, L, directed to her estranged lover, K, Kapadia’s film is at once grand and contained, weaving fragments of a romance and moments of domestic life with handheld documentary footage captured around the country over several years. In this fervent cinétract on love and revolt, which doubles as a love letter to cinema itself, essayistic and epistolary forms suffuse the burnished, chiaroscuro images with both yearning and introspection. Utilizing a variety of formats and formal approaches in service of an entrancing, cohesive whole, the film offers a rich and sensual interplay between sound and image that heightens its atmospheric textures. The dialectic of presence and absence fuels the paradoxical conundrum of capturing the flow of history, while the fitting leitmotif of dancing courses through the film with unbridled energy. A film of unexpected urgency, A Night of Knowing Nothing announces the arrival of an audacious cinematic talent.
