Country: India, France, Netherlands, Italy, Luxembourg, Belgium, USA, Switzerland
Language: Malayalam, Hindi, Marathi, Tamil, English
Director/Screenwriter: Payal Kapadia
Composer: Dhritiman Das
Cinematographer: Ranabir Das
Editor: Clément Pinteaux
Cast:
Kani Kuscruti
Divya Prabha
Chhaya Kadam
Hridhu Haroon
Azees Nedumangad
Anand Sami
Rating: 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).
尔后，一段段宣讲、集会、游行的画面，女孩独白，“My dear, I have become a feverish prisoner of rhetohic”（亲爱的，我已经成了豪言壮语狂热的囚徒）。我一阵痛，到底该如何理解这其中的失落？那些“豪言壮语”大多是男性的声音，是一种掌控与宣告的语言；而她的声音呢，写信、等待、怀疑，与豪言相比是那么贬抑。
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).
信件是一种被迫的距离。
无论与恋人之间，还是与社会、政治之间，都是一种无法直接抵达的姿态。L必须在某种缺席中说话，这正是她所处时代的境况：一切亲密都被历史推开，对延迟的回声都不寄期望。
我知道，在Kapadia的语境里，爱情从来就是政治的。在印度，恋爱与种姓、宗教抗争几乎无法分割。可我依然在影片里感受到另一种更幽微的失落，无法忽视信件未能抵达的寂静。我们会想象这种“政治化的爱”是一段私人走向公共的渐进过程，但那不是真的。相反，L的声音始终被困在某种往复里——她既在见证抗争，又始终在现场之外。画面上，我们似乎逐渐靠近那个重要的运动；而在信件中，她却始终在反复、在调和困惑。
这种并置非常诚实，私人与公共不是两个阶段，而是彼此缠绕的幻象。信件意外被发现，于是亲密暴露在政治的光照下。我们无法确切言说自己到底失去了什么，失落不可启齿，因为每个年代都是那么笃定当下就是觉醒的年代。那些模糊的言语都必将变成被历史推开的余音。
好在Kapadia用这封信的形式，让情感与政治在同一个频率上震荡。
觉醒的情感结构里往往包含一种超我式的召唤——一种对纯洁、奉献、牺牲的渴望。它要求主体抛弃小我去追求大我的正义。这种要求一旦被内化，就会让爱欲显得次等，甚至被误认为软弱、分心或妥协。于是，觉醒消灭了日常，消灭了爱欲。我意识到自己身处这种撕裂之中，在政治觉醒与私人依恋之间无法调和，表现为一种混沌的绝望。意识到这点已经很久了。
影片的最后诉说着这样一层意义：面对这个逐渐走向黑白分明的世界，抗争是为了恢复感知力和责任感，我们可以喜欢过去的某些部分，也不该用非黑即白的方式思考问题，但不能拒斥现实。但革命的结构经常就是要偏向非此即彼：敌人/同盟、真理/谎言、牺牲/背叛。而爱欲的语法是纠缠的，它建立在模糊、犹疑、差异、延迟之上。就像不会抵达的书信，和痛楚却让人沉溺回温的关系。
影片早些时候，L突然有些激动地对那个被她思念的男友发问——为什么你可以勇敢地在街头喊出“自由”的口号，却在我们因为种姓而被分开时，对你的父母沉默了？爱与政治信念哪一个更真实而不虚伪呢？
尔后，一段段宣讲、集会、游行的画面，女孩独白，“My dear, I have become a feverish prisoner of rhetohic”（亲爱的，我已经成了豪言壮语狂热的囚徒）。我一阵痛，到底该如何理解这其中的失落？那些“豪言壮语”大多是男性的声音，是一种掌控与宣告的语言；而她的声音呢，写信、等待、怀疑，与豪言相比是那么贬抑。
谁又会为豪言承诺负责呢？似乎无人能——也不该有人。但那不重要了，我感觉到了一种最深的失败，我们已然在觉醒中极其清醒地失去了爱。
#ICA 导演Payal的第一部长片作品，影院刚好有她的作品全展，又很喜欢《想象之光》，所以就打算把她的作品全看了，前几部短片感觉非常像阿彼察邦的作品风格，曼陀罗式的关于国家，关于记忆。这部作品则是带有诗意及梦境质感的纪实纪录片，影片以一位匿名人L的信件作为主线，导演以其私人情感的视角与社会的状态相关联对政治，艺术，权力和结构进行了探讨，展现了某个特殊时刻及对于未来的思考，电影穿梭于梦境与现实之间，是对散落记忆的拾取，并书写了一个不在人们视野中的历史，记录了一个应该被记录的时刻。
内容上，信件是一个入口，出口则是2015年印度由削减特困生奖学金引发的学升酝懂，大量学生强烈不满，认为改革时忽视了教育公平性，后续也是持续发酵直至熟悉的流程。可以看出她为什么拍摄了《想象之光》、影片中私人信件出现了《想象》的大量“基底”，如爱情，种性，女性和宗教等议题。片中带有极强的反思性，女性警察那幕十分震撼，尤其是还引用了帕索里尼在1968年意大利事件中的话语。
视听上，基本是音画分离，画面大量的使用拼贴手法，将自己的创作，纪录片，私人影像和监控器画面，交织在一起，结合着信件独白，现场收音，影像原声，编写的台词和配乐（结尾处的合成器真的绝了）塑造了一场社会性，实验性并且模糊了现实与虚构的故事（蒙太奇效果非常好）。影片也通过混合不同来源的素材，构建了一种非线性叙事结构，这种风格总让我想起《我是古巴》那满是诗意的影像，结合着私人属性，影像成了个人记忆的碎片也是集体创伤的记录。开场与结尾的设计非常好，以社会婚俗呈现出信件中个体对于种性制度的无奈，结尾收到了电影学院老师的教导，都是“正在进行”的呈现（导演的新片也恰恰说明了老师的话语，声音不会消失），虽然历史在重复。
很巧合，从这部与生态毫不相关的影像作品中得到了正在研究的问题的答案。
研究生态影像和生态思想的过程中，向许多人发问，生态的影像表达到底应当形而上还是应当具体、及物？没有人给我足够让人信服的回答。然后我把目光投向生态女性主义，很长一段时间我无法解答为何生态女性主义能说服我，但绝不仅仅因为“我也是女性”这么简单的回答。
直到看见L在暴乱游行的时刻，在种族与阶级的斗争爆发的混乱中，她看到警察，但她说，她们是要回家为全家人做饭、送孩子上学的女性。此时我的思维短暂地陷入真空，然后意识到，原来生态女性主义最有说服力的原因在于，我们作为女性，从不否认自己作为人，从不试图将自己从人类社会中剥离，我们看到种族，看到阶级，看到国家，也用同样的目光看到生态。
如果我们注定永远无法突破作为人类的思维边界，那我们就从人类社会内部的斗争开始，然后尽力向边界之外眺望。而不是简单粗暴地说：“人类的诞生是原罪，自然是世界的中心。”
这里是校园，却看不到教室，也看不到上课的场景，黑白的画面让人觉得好像是在穿过漫漫长夜，不知道尽头在哪里。
反复在我脑海里重现的，是远处的发着微光的窗户，是深夜的空地上架起的电影荧幕，是黑暗中围坐在一起彼此劝勉的年轻人。
刚开始我一直在等着写信的女孩L出现，我听到她的声音，也看到她的字和画，我在屏幕上的那些女孩里寻找着，哪一个是她呢。为什么她的名字只用一个字母代替，是因为她是的种姓所以她的名字不允许被写下吗，还是因为害怕被发现被迫害而不得不隐去名字。L从头到尾也没有出现，可是她所经历的，是屏幕里的每一个年轻人都在经历的，她写下的思考，那些字里行间流露出的情绪，也同样流淌在每一个年轻人的心里。
尼赫鲁大学的暴动发生过后，其他学校的学生们举着火炬聚集在一起，有一个女孩在人群中讲话，她说“我们必须反对暴力，我们必须反对他们在日常生活中的愚蠢行径，在我们每一天的生活中，我们必须去反对我们的父母，我们的老师、教授、家人、亲戚，无论对方是谁，如果我们不这么做，不断妥协的话，右翼势力就会继续攻击我们”，她的年纪应该只有二十出头，黑暗中她的眼里满含泪水，她的声音不时地带着嘶哑和颤抖，刚刚目睹了流血的同伴，刚刚接到被捕的同伴打来的诉说着无助和恐惧的电话，她一定也还在惊魂未定之中，但她还是想要站在这里，坚定地对剩下的同伴们说出这些话。
L在中间一封信里写，她和朋友们围坐在篮球场上，她有了新的同学，他们真诚地听着其他人的讲话，他们开心地聚在一起，用蛋糕、音乐和舞蹈来纪念已故的电影前辈，讲到这一段时，屏幕上也突然有了色彩。我很感动，为这样珍贵的友谊，为那些温暖快乐的时刻，为那些真挚热烈的情感，可同时又觉得不敢相信，这样的时刻和那些不断在发生的反抗、镇压和迫害事件的反差太大，它们好像不在同一个世界里。如果是在别的电影里，听到深夜里的虫鸣，看到很日常的生活场景，应该很容易让人觉得惬意吧，可在这个片子里，我总是在这样的时候感到不安，不知道这样的时刻还会持续多久，不知道接下来会有什么可怕的事情要发生。
L在最后一封信里写，“我无法入睡，我的胸口觉得好闷好闷，我好害怕……”，她讲自己做了很可怕的梦，在梦里，她和朋友们一起参加抗议，突然有警车向他们开过来，警察用高压水柱对着所有人喷水，朋友们一个接一个地融化消失在水柱里。和L读信的声音同时出现在屏幕上的，是警察对大学师生的又一次镇压行动，录像的画面里，计时器不停变动着数字，慌乱的人群挤到一个出不去的角落，警察不停用棍棒击打他们，人群四散逃窜，直到最后镜头里只剩下警察，画面终止在摄像头被他们砸掉的一刻。现实世界里发生的事情，比梦境里的还要可怕，可是对L来说，她只能把所有的恐惧和悲伤都写进寄不出去的信里，写给可能已经因为无力反抗而背叛自己的曾经的爱人，写给自己心里希望的那个TA。不知道在写完最后一封信之后，L和她的朋友们，又遭遇了什么。