A night of knowing nothing

A night of knowing nothing, a night of ignorance, as the title warns us. And it’s all true, this first feature film by young Indian director Payal Kapadia makes the choice of darkness. A profusion of black, striped with flashes of light, almost thick matter, tinting the blocks that help the film progress. The plot is thin: L. is a young cinema student who falls in love with K; while at the university, there are demonstrations going on that are gradually and increasingly repressed. It’s quite clear: the idea is to document perfectly real events, that took place recently, while ensuring they are elevated to truly measure up to the hopes that fuelled them. In other words, to convey the feeling that the adventure of contestation, is not an observable, clear-cut “fact”, but rather an adventure of the senses, to a certain extent opaque, a nervous crossing of different spaces: rhetoric, activist, human, love, friendship, crime, etc.. This is exactly where the power and audacity of Payal Kapadia’s enterprise lies, in a gesture that she explicitly borrows from Pasolini: telling the story of protestation, the exercise of political sovereignty, as well as the excited, contrasting and sometimes uncertain description of a space of love. We are invited to allow ourselves to be drawn into this passionate possibility, for a sequence where emotions come one after the other, each more intelligent than the other.
(Jean-Pierre Rehm)