Bodies sway to a beat we can’t hear. Instead, a muffled, disembodied voice (Bhumisuta Das) mumbles over flickering black and white images that look soft to the touch, like a love letter that becomes velvety after repeated reading. A movie is shown behind the dancers. Sometimes one of them breaks into the beam and becomes part of the screen for a moment. Sometimes there are small dramas, like hugs or arguments. But mostly, there is only silent, almost ghostly movement, silhouette and shadow: just a few seconds into Paila Kapadia’s shimmering, poetic essay, “A Night of Knowing Nothing,” it feels like we’ve delved into the excavation of someone’s few hours. someone else’s memories.

Kapadia’s film was made during her time at the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII), and it is extremely interested in reflecting on the role that third-tier institutions can play in times of great social upheaval. Among DP/editor Ranabir Das’s beautifully shadowy images, often dark to the point of abstraction, are occasional shots of FTII dormitories, corridors and open spaces where student activists gather. And somewhere in one of the rooms, we are told, a cache of letters was discovered detailing a love affair that was thwarted because of caste. Thus, the voice of “L,” the author of the letters, is mixed with that of a narrator who may or may not be Kapadia herself to present an intimate, retrospective impression of the problems caused by the rise of India’s Hindu nationalist Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, and the resistance movement, in which universities played a key role, that emerged to oppose him. In every sense but the peer-reviewed one, A Night of Knowing Nothing is a student film.

There is a disconnect between the giddy mood and the poignant, still raw events in question, and this gives the film a special power. The sound design by Moynac Bose and Romain Ozanne played a special role in creating this strange dislocation: often shots of the crowd singing loudly will be played in an eerie silence, only briefly broken by a small synchronized atmosphere preserved in the mix. This makes the footage of passionate speeches and dramatic protest marches seem distant and fragile; the sparing use of brooding, unrecognizable electronic instrumentation also contributes to this floating feeling, as the events of 2015 and after the game seem to be ancient, or perhaps not rooted in time at all, eternal.

The real facts behind the scenes are often shocking. News clips create a parallel between the rise of Trump and the resurgence of fundamentalist nationalism in India. The narrator reflects on the significance of the infamous lynching of a dairy farmer by Hindu extremists (the so-called “cow vigilantes”) and the gang rape and murder of an 8-year-old Muslim girl in 2018. She is haunted by her memories of the day Rohit Vemula, a PhD student at the Central University of Hyderabad who came from the Dalit minority (formerly “untouchables”), committed suicide due to institutional victimization and exclusion.

With so much on my mind and so many different fragments-Super 8 home movies, archival footage, newspaper headlines, short abstract flashes of color-one might argue whether the framing device is necessary for framing love letters or just another complicating factor. But it does provide a scattered collection of moments and reflections with a very loose structure, as L’s messages to her lover change tone. The language, at first full of longing and youthful fervor, becomes harsher and colder as disillusionment sets in, ending in mutual accusations: “Maybe you were never as brave as I thought you were.” Perhaps this is meant to reflect the process of political awakening that students of Kapadia’s generation experienced. The initial exhilaration of solidarity and righteous activism gives way to a gradual realization that the status quo will not change so quickly, which in turn gives way to a weary understanding that often years of fighting for freedom of speech and freedom from oppression will lead to neither. Only the struggle continues.

There is a certain melancholy in this observation, perhaps even a certain despair, which is reinforced by the strange nostalgic atmosphere that Capadia evokes. But there is a glimmer of hope in her obvious cinephilia (at one intriguing moment she stops to wonder what Pasolini would have said about her encounter with a policeman on the march). In pictures as soft as the fabric of worn clothes, in a voiceover as quiet as dusk, the pure sensual pleasures of filmmaking become a kind of motivation, reminding us that cinema is not only a useful tool in the fight against injustice and tyranny. When there are films as interesting, expressive and intimate as The Night of the Unknowable, this is also what we fight for.