Hard Light Cinema

🎥 Part 2/3 of our Experimental Documentary series

Indian filmmaker Payal Kapadia, director of 2024’s Grand Prix-winning All We Imagine as Light, is one of the freshest and most exciting voices in experimental cinema today. Fusing protest documentary with romantic fiction, her debut film A Night of Knowing Nothing is a moving record of left-wing student activism at the Film and Television Institute of India. Fictional letters between an anonymous student named L. and her lover reveal the heartbreaking consequences of struggle against the right-wing, anti-Muslim Modi regime. Kapadia catalogues and dramatizes the anguish and heroic bravery of these young activists with the gentle, haunting poetic style and dreamlike textures she would later find wide acclaim for in All We Imagine as Light.

— Syd, Hard Light Cinema