Title: A Night of Knowing NothingYear: 2021Genre: DocumentaryCountry: India, FranceLanguage: Hindi, English, BengaliDirector: Payal KapadiaWriters: Payal Kapadia, Himanshu PrajapatiCinematographer/Editor: Ranabir DasCast:Bhumisuta DasRating: 7.2/10Title: All We Imagine as LightYear: 2024Genre: Drama, RomanceCountry: India, France, Netherlands, Italy, Luxembourg, Belgium, USA, SwitzerlandLanguage: Malayalam, Hindi, Marathi, Tamil, EnglishDirector/Screenwriter: Payal KapadiaComposer: Dhritiman DasCinematographer: Ranabir DasEditor: Clément Pinteaux Cast:Kani Kuscruti Divya PrabhaChhaya KadamHridhu HaroonAzees NedumangadAnand SamiRating: 8.0/10
In the grand tradition of cinematic titles that feel like a poetic question, Kapadia’s debut feature A NIGHT OF KNOWING NOTHING arrives not with answers, but with a riddle murmured in hushed dismay. This docufiction’s aim is to seek afflatus out of the wording from the letters written by a fictional film student (simply known as L.) and the fragments of footage about recent student protests she can garner. It is a potent collage, a ghost story takes shape in black and white.
The film’s narrative backbone is L.’s letters, addressed to her estranged lover, whose absence is due to the pair’s caste differences. We hear her voice (narrated by Bhumisuta Das), a gentle, sorrowful incantation, narrating her pain, her longing, and her quiet rebellion. These profoundly personal moments are spliced and entangled, sometimes vehemently, with gritty footage of real student protests, like in 2015, FTII (Film and Television Institute of India) students protest against Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s appointment of right-wing B-list actor Gajendra Chauhan as the chairman of their university, which the students saw as a move to make their curriculums and their campus more conservative. The two threads, the intimate and the epic, are brought into a shared space, like a delicate stream merging with a turbulent river.
Kapadia’s flourish is rooted in this collision. The personal heartache of a broken love affair becomes a microcosm for a larger political struggle. The sound of a student shouting slogans through a megaphone is a direct echo of L.’s silent scream. The students’ faces are a mosaic of defiance and fatigue, a visual metaphor for the weight of a society that seeks to regulate not just behavior, but ideology itself. There are no talking heads, no expository text, A NIGHT OF KNOWING NOTHING trusts audience to connect these dots, to feel the weight of a Procrustean system that can both annul a relationship and crush a protest with equal, bureaucratic force.
The film premiered in Cannes’ Directors' Fortnight section and was honored with the Golden Eye award. This accolade recognizes Kapadia’s daring use of form and expression to aver a topically political statement (though it is a trite one as if protest is the only resort the voiceless and the mass can turn to under the umbrella of democracy), firmly establishing her as an emergent voice unafraid to challenge conventions and conformity. That said, Kapadia’s bricolage-like approach, while aesthetically entrancing, can also feel like a mosaic of found objects, where the individual shards gleam but the complete picture remains tantalizingly out of focus.
Kapadia’s directorial paper trail is a fascinating one, and the success of her follow-up, ALL WE IMAGINE AS LIGHT (another incomparably poetic title), feels less like a pivot and more like a direct, poetic continuation. While A NIGHT OF KNOWING NOTHING is a miscellany of monochrome self-reflection and home truths, this one blossoms into a resonant, lyrical and occasionally surreal tale. Strewing documentary-style observations of urban life in Mumbai into the film, she shifts from the intellectual anger to the quiet dignity, tacit solidarity and everyday resilience of two nurses navigating love and friendship in the bustling labyrinth of the megacity.
The transition from documentary to fiction is an artistic evolution where Kapadia can conceptualize a story that is most faithfully to her vision and discernment. The phantom-like letters of L. are replaced by fully-embodied characters - Prabha and Anu (Kusruti and Prabha) - whose struggles are private and yet reflect the immense social and political forces shaping and dictating their lives (a surreptitious interfaith romance, an absent husband, an unfair displacement, etc.). Kapadia acquits herself as a filmmaker who comprehends that the most political acts often begin with the most personal desires. In both films, she finds the light, the texture, and the heartbeat of a community in defiance of a system that aims to render them invisible.
ALL WE IMAGINE AS LIGHT also continues Kapadia’s winning streak, capping the Grand Prix in Cannes, the festival's second-highest honor, a historic victory as the first Indian film to ever claim the prize. This momentous win signals to the world that her brand of poeticized cinema, with its autochthonous perspective, its tender, empathetic portrayal of womanhood, has that “it” factor and appeal to a global audience.
While Dhritiman Das’ sublime score flows like the film’s emotional tether, hushed, melancholic, rises and falls with the characters’ interior lives like the city’s own breathing, ALL WE IMAGINE AS LIGHT also hits the jackpot with its cast. Kusruti, as the stoic, reserved Prabha, is supernal in conveying unspoken thoughts. She tactfully and beauteously reveals a woman's tumultuous interiority, a realm of implicit conflicts and the heavy, unacknowledged burden of a marriage suspended in limbo. Her face becomes a canvas of controlled emotions, going through hardships with a steely dignity, including a fanciful interlude where she is able to reconcile with her long-lost husband (a remarkably underplaying Sami) culminating in her graceful empathy when Anu finally comes clean to her. She is the calm center of the film, a woman who has learned to endure, and Kusruti's portrayal is so vividly felt that it makes her smallest moments of vulnerability feel like seismic events.
Prabha, in contrast, delivers something luminous, effervescent to the younger Anu. She is the film's source of light, a character brimming with a youthful optimism that hasn't yet been dulled by the harsh realities of the city. Her romance with her Muslim boyfriend Shiaz (Haroon, another fine, delightful discovery) is the film's tender heart. Prabha appears both delicate and strong, capturing the thrill of a genuine love against the backdrop of societal disapproval. Together, the two leads’ built a lived-in, sisterly bond. Their friendship feels authentic, a sanctuary where they can unburden their private struggles and find solace and support in each other's company. This natural, unforced intimacy is the film’s greatest triumph, indicating a story about the fight for a dignified life can be told not with a roar, but with a compassionate grace.
Additionally, Kadam, who plays Parvathy, the cook of the hospital where both Prabha and Anu travail, a widow who has no say to keep her home after her husband’s death, adeptly keeps the balance between grievance and buoyancy, all with a dash of philosophical awareness.
Deep down, A NIGHT OF KNOWING NOTHING is an aestheticized affidavit against casteism and draconian measures suppressing free speech. Meanwhile ALL WE IMAGINE AS LIGHT is a diptych: first, it manifests the struggles of her characters, and then carefully seeks out the light they carry within them, a light that can survive even the darkest nights (the two parts are delineated by their different loci: city versus countryside/seaside). Kapadia’s trajectory from the polemical, ethereal black-and-white of her documentary to the insightful richness of her fiction debut demonstrates a rare facility to find the universal in the personal, especially from the multifarious soils of the third cinema.
referential entries: Ritesh Batra's THE LUNCHBOX (2013, 7.3/10); Deepa Mehta's FUNNY BOY (2020, 6.5/10); Mohammad Rasoulof's THE SEED OF THE SACRED FIG (2024, 7.9/10).
