Critic Reviews

The movie expresses so much, so delicately, about precarious young hearts, the storm clouds of nationalist politics and, most of all, the possibility and necessity of artistic freedom.

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.

Only a few seconds into Payal Kapadia’s shimmery, poetic essay doc A Night of Knowing Nothing, it feels like we are a few hours deep into the excavation of someone else’s memories.

Through disrupting linear time, Kapadia’s speculative, poetic rumination on memory, political reality and personal association transforms the viewing experience into something transcendent.

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.

A Night of Knowing Nothing is a celebration not merely of resistance, but also of joy and art as a political act in the face of despair.

Love for the moving image – and love for artistic creativity – marches hand in hand with the fight for political freedom.

Right from its opening frame, there’s a lyrical, dreamlike quality to Payal Kapadia’s debut feature.

Because of Kapadia’s collage-like approach, A Night Of Knowing Nothing occasionally feels loose and shapeless. But there is a discernible trajectory here.