A Night of Knowing Nothing with Payal Kapadia
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[September 22, 2021] A conversation with Payal Kapadia about her remarkably brave and powerful film A NIGHT OF KNOWING NOTHING, which took home awards at Cannes, TIFF, and CIFF. Here, Kapadia discusses her artistic approach, sources of inspiration, and the freedom she finds in documentary filmmaking.
The film is structured around a series of love letters written by a university student in India to her estranged lover, who separated because of caste differences. Read in voiceover from an unseen protagonist, the letters provide an intimate glimpse into a young woman's life and the drastic changes taking place around her while shining light on a contemporary convoluted India.
Composed mostly of grainy black-in-white analog film and mixed with newspaper clippings, family archives, and viral videos found off the internet, A NIGHT OF KNOWING NOTHING takes on an amorphous form, merging reality with fiction, dreams with memories, fantasies with anxieties. It unfolds like a long, unpredictable night, where we are all in the dark about what to expect next.
It’s a remarkably powerful and brave film that lingers long after watching it. So it was with great admiration for her work that we reached out to Payal Kapadia to invite her to speak about her artistic practice, sources of inspiration, and the freedom she finds in non-fiction cinema.
Facilitating the conversation is Aylin Gökmen. Aylin is a Turkish-Swiss filmmaker. Her short film SPIRITS AND ROCKS: AN AZOREAN MYTH premiered at Locarno and has screened at a number of festivals, including Sundance and Telluride. Aylin also takes on a formally inventive approach, blending carefully composed black and white documentary images with archive and an evocative soundscape.
PAYAL’S SOURCES OF INSPIRATION:
Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Mysterious Object at Noon (2000)
Miguel Gomes - Arabian Nights (2015)
José Luis Guerín and Jonas Mekas, Correspondence (2011)
John Berger (2005), And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos
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PAYAL KAPADIA, FEATURED FILMMAKER
Payal Kapadia is a Mumbai based filmmaker and artist. A graduate of the Film and Television Institute of India, Kapadia’s 2017 short “Afternoon Clouds” premiered at Cannes as a Cinéfondation selection. And her short film, And What Is The Summer Saying premiered at the Berlinale. She is a Berlinale Talents alumna and participated in 2019 at the Cinéfondation – Résidence du Festival de Cannes. Her next project, All We Imagine As Light, for which she received support from Ciclic and Hubert Bals Fund, is currently in development.