L writes letters to her estranged lover. Through these letters, we get a glimpse into the drastic changes taking place around her. Merging reality with fiction, dreams, memories, fantasies and anxieties, an amorphous narrative unfolds.... (Full plot summary below)
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L writes letters to her estranged lover. Through these letters, we get a glimpse into the drastic changes taking place around her. Merging reality with fiction, dreams, memories, fantasies and anxieties, an amorphous narrative unfolds.
Leave your thoughts about A Night of Knowing Nothing.
| Chicago TribuneMichael PhillipsThe 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. |
| VarietyJessica KiangOnly 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. |
| Little White LiesMarina AshiotiThrough disrupting linear time, Kapadia’s speculative, poetic rumination on memory, political reality and personal association transforms the viewing experience into something transcendent. |
| IndieWireSiddhant AdlakhaThis 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. |
| The Globe and Mail (Toronto)Aparita BhandariRight from its opening frame, there’s a lyrical, dreamlike quality to Payal Kapadia’s debut feature. |
| The A.V. ClubLawrence GarciaBecause of Kapadia’s collage-like approach, A Night Of Knowing Nothing occasionally feels loose and shapeless. But there is a discernible trajectory here. |
| CineVueChristopher MachellA 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. |
| The GuardianPhuong LeLove for the moving image – and love for artistic creativity – marches hand in hand with the fight for political freedom. |
| The Film StageDavid KatzThrough 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. |
| User Review15KRandomMovieA film with a very important message that gets highly diluted by abstract and obscure artistic decisions. The strong areas of this movie are the real footage of protests and the violent reactions to the students. The moments of silence or ambient noises with grainy, dark, black and white footage are distractions away from telling the story of student freedom and the continuing societal issues with castes in India. Check out our podcast 15K+ Random Movie Reviews for a more in depth review. |
