Cannes Best Documentary will be released in cinemas this Wednesday: A Night Without Knowledge, which was crowned with the Festival’s Gold Prize in 2021. Hypnotic Indian film at the crossroads of fiction and document.
Რ About?
Somewhere in India, a film student writes letters to a girlfriend who has been divorced. His voice is mixed with images, fragments collected according to life moments, celebrations and events that tell the story of a world darkened by radical change. The film will lead us to the fears, desires, memories of a young man who rebelled and loved freedom.
At the crossroads of feature and documentary film
This film about Indian youth has won the Cannes Best Documentary Film Award and is coming out in cinemas today. Tout une nuit sans savoir, the first feature film directed by young Indian filmmaker Payal Kapadia has a rather unique genesis that allows us to better understand the finished film.
This is a really long-term project that started in 2017. The filmmaker began collecting many kinds of images, yet without a common thread, until everything made sense.
“With these documents and the testimonies of our friends, their dreams, memories, anxieties, a picture of a section of the Indian youth began to emerge.Explains the director in the film’s press team. “When we started editing a few sequences, some of our friends provided us with pictures that they took at other universities in the country.. “
A picture of part of the youth of India appeared
Large plastic and sound beauty film combines images from all sources and formats (demonstration images, various digital recordings, 16mm or super 8 films, etc.). The filmmaker’s work consisted, in particular, of shooting all these images in the same film, where everything merges and ends very smoothly. The result is a film in which a person loses support and allows himself to be abducted thanks to a form that combines the intimate and the political.
“The images we collect have become an ever-accumulating archive of memories – memories of the time we lived and saw.“, Payal Kapadia continues.Soon even the footage we took began to feel as if it had been “found”, perhaps a time capsule from our past. We started working on a narrative to connect all these seemingly unrelated images.“
Beyond its form, which combines fiction and documentary and recalls the work of Chris Marker-like filmmakers, the film captures the resonance it finds. These pictures taken in India in recent years have a special echo and depict these faithful youth who are in revolt. These pictures can also recall the May 68 movements in France.
Unknown all night long, a golden eye on the skin of 2021 will be released in cinemas this Wednesday.
Source: allocine
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