A Night of Knowing Nothing

A student called L at a film school in India writes letters to the lover she has been separated from. The letters are read out and the image shows student life: classes, corridors, meetings held at night. Then the student movement begins. A couple separated over a relationship across castes, appointments imposed on universities, a student's suicide and police interventions follow one another. The letters continue. Payal Kapadia directs. The form is mixed. Invented letters and real footage sit together; recordings made by students on phones, news material and archive are used in the same flow. The image is largely black and white and low resolution, a choice coming both from the source of the material and from a deliberate style. The events it rests on are real. The protests in Indian universities after 2015, the strike at the Film and Television Institute and the state's intervention in educational institutions are its direct subject. Kapadia was herself a student at that school while making it and had been prosecuted for taking part in the strike. It won the Golden Eye, the documentary prize, at the 2021 Cannes film festival. Kapadia later became known for All We Imagine as Light. Who it is for: viewers who follow experimental documentary and political cinema. Who it is not for: the narrative is deliberately scattered, no context is given, and some passages are closed without a knowledge of the argument about Indian universities.