The Globe and Mail (Toronto) by Aparita Bhandari
Right from its opening frame, there’s a lyrical, dreamlike quality to Payal Kapadia’s debut feature.
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France, India · 2022
1h 37m
Director Payal Kapadia
Starring Bhumisuta Das
Genre Documentary
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L, a university student in India, writes letters to her estranged lover while he is away. These letters give a glimpse into the drastic changes taking place around her. Merging reality with fiction, dreams, memories, fantasies and anxieties, an amorphous narrative unfolds.
The Globe and Mail (Toronto) by Aparita Bhandari
Right from its opening frame, there’s a lyrical, dreamlike quality to Payal Kapadia’s debut feature.
Through its slippery cinematic language and elusive point-of-view, Kapadia depicts a moment happening urgently in the film’s present-day strand––a wave of anti-government student protests and their resulting crackdown––and treats it like memory, which we know operates as anything but a direct mental recording device.
The A.V. Club by Lawrence Garcia
Because of Kapadia’s collage-like approach, A Night Of Knowing Nothing occasionally feels loose and shapeless. But there is a discernible trajectory here.
This combination of lively image and mournful narration imbues the camera’s fly-on-the-wall perspective with a sense of melancholy. As life unfolds with verve and passion, the spectral narrator, L, exists at a remove, as if she were both present amidst the frolic, and distant from it, her heartbreak leaving her unable to get involved.
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