Films at the Whitney

A Night of Knowing Nothing. Winner of the Golden Eye award at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival, director Payal Kapadia’s 2021 debut film weaves reality with fiction to tell a story through love letters found in a cupboard at the Film and Television Institute of India. The words of the letters written to an estranged lover mingle with archival footage and student protest videos of the widespread religious and caste-based discrimination intensifying under Narendra Modi. Jessica Kiang at Variety describes this film as “soft as the fabric of oft-worn clothes”; “the sheer sensual pleasures of filmmaking become their own kind of motivation, reminding us that cinema is not just a useful tool in the fight against injustice and tyranny.”