The narrator of A Night of Knowing Nothing casts a nocturnal spell. She reads aloud from love letters supposedly found in a cupboard at the Film & Television Institute of India. Beneath her words, university students dance the night away. In an uncanny blend of fact and fiction, Payal Kapadia’s debut feature, and the winner of the Golden Eye award for best documentary at the 2021 Cannes International Film Festival, follows an uprising of student protests in response to austerity measures imposed by India’s far-right government. With archival footage abutting documentation of contemporary struggle and personal yearning inflecting mass movement, Kapadia’s film occupies a liminal space between dreams and life, art and politics. Her film is as sensual as it is powerful, as delicate as it is sloganeering. It captures a generation that feels squeezed and trapped in a cinematic form that is expansive beyond any genre constraints. ~TW