Payal Kapadia is a filmmaker based in Mumbai. Her work explores memory, friendship, political unrest, and the textures of everyday life, working across fiction and non-fiction cinema. She has screened at major festivals including the Cannes Film Festival, where A Night of Knowing Nothing premiered in Directors’ Fortnight and won the Golden Eye Documentary Award, and where her debut fiction feature All We Imagine As Light became the first Indian film in competition in thirty years, receiving the Grand Prix. Her films have continued to circulate internationally, earning nominations such as the Golden Globe for Best Director and Best Foreign Language Film, and awards including Best Film at the Asian Film Awards.
Payal Kapadia
India
A Night of Knowing Nothing
In A Night of Knowing Nothing, an Indian film student writes letters to her boyfriend, from whom she was forcibly separated. She reflects on her daily life, disillusionments, and inner thoughts. Her voice blends in with images of unrest in university campuses, press clippings, and archival footage from Narendra Modi’s rise to power. Kapadia’s Cannes-winning documentary turns love for cinema into a form of political resistance, combining artistic commitment with the fight for freedom.
Told through imagined letters between two film students separated by caste, the film unfolds against the 2015 student protests at the Film and Television Institute of India, after Prime Minister Modi appointed a right-wing former actor as the institute’s chairman. Drawn from home videos, archival clips, and CCTV footage, the film layers its images with grainy, black-and-white texture, giving them an analogue feel.
Kapadia captures quiet moments of student life as well as the fierce energy of dissent. Their chants invoke revolutionary Soviet filmmakers, “Eisenstein, Pudovkin… we shall fight, we shall win,” reviving old cinematic ideals as acts of protest. Through this mix of love, cinema and protest, the film turns the love for cinema into a living language of resistance. It leaves us with a haunting question: what does state-funded art mean in an unfree nation?