Payal Kapadia

Payal Kapadia

Filmmaker Payal Kapadia grew up exposed to the arts. She went to a school where they were quite keen on students focusing on arts as well as academics. Also having an artist mother did help her learn a lot about different art practices. After high school, Payal wanted to do something in cinema but thought it prudent to get a bachelor’s degree first. Interestingly, she chose sociology and economics to help her understand “contemporary realities”, which would’ve definitely helped her in whichever profession she would eventually pursue. “In college, we would have a lot of free time. At the time, Mumbai had many wonderful film festivals one could attend, like MAMI, MIFF, and Experimenta,” recalls Payal. “You could get an affordable festival pass and spend the whole afternoon watching films. Watching films in the cinema is very important and I think it opens one’s mind to the medium better than watching them on one’s laptop.This is when I started seriously getting interested in films.” Payal’s debut feature-length documentary, A Night of Knowing Nothing, is a labor of love that has taken five years of her life. It is an epistolary film that uses unsent love letters to push the audience into much larger issues. “I am not a director who is always very certain of how the outcome of the film will seem. I am more interested in evolving with the process of the film on a day-to-day basis, discovering it as one goes along. I like this way of working. But it also means the process takes a bit of time. This film also became a way for me to understand certain political and social realities and what my position to address them could possibly be.”

More about Payal and the film below.

Payal Kapadia

TIME AT FTII
Being at a film school like FTII was probably the best way to learn cinema for me. Only because I was surrounded by students from all over the country and it helps build a diverse and creative community that enriched itself daily. If one can find such a community outside of film school, then that could also work. But for me, it was a good time as I focused a lot on the academic aspects of film as well and it helped me grow and understand how I wanted to make films. It helped me to find my future collaborators with whom I continue to work. We had good teachers too that ensured we participated in different exercises that forced us to develop an understanding of the cinematic form, recognize its potential and address our developing worldviews.

Payal Kapadia

A NIGHT OF KNOWING NOTHING
Ranabir (who is the cinematographer of the film) and I were shooting things on the FTII campus without really knowing what we were making. We started taking long interviews with our friends about personal matters and questions of politics and love always came up. Later, our other friends, who were shooting in different universities, gave us more footage. After five years of collecting and shooting, we made a film which is now called A Night of Knowing Nothing.

The film is from the point of view of a young student, only known by the letter ‘L’. We discover her world through unsent letters she has written, like a journal, that are addressed to her estranged lover. The two of them have been separated as his parents disapprove of their relationship. Through her letters we get a sense of the changes taking place around her and in the country as well. Merging reality with fiction, dreams, memories, fantasies and anxieties, an amorphous narrative unfolds. What I want the audience to take away from the film is the importance of public universities in India and how we need to protect them.

TREATMENT
It is a found footage film as some of the footage we got was from different sources, shot by several different camera persons. Since we took so long to make the film, the footage that we ourselves had shot several years ago, also felt “found”. The sound is an important part of the film and works in a way to evoke inner, hidden feelings that are not always possible to talk about through words or images. Sound can affect us subliminally as it is in the form of actual physical waves that penetrate our ears.

WHAT’S NEXT...
I am working on another feature project with pretty much the same team of people. It is also a sort of love story. The main protagonists are nurses working in Mumbai.

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Text Hansika Lohani Mehtani
Date 06-06-2022