Cannes 2021: ‘A Night of Knowing Nothing’ top documentary award for filmmaker Payal Kapadia… (video interview)

A young filmmaker was handed a prestigious award triumphing over some much bigger names… acv caught up with her just before the presentation the following day and about which she knew nothing at the time…and this interview took place only hours after the world had seen the film for the first time…

DIRECTOR Payal Kapadia’s film ‘A Night of Knowing Nothing’ scored a big triumph at Cannes 2021 – bagging the prestigious Oeil D’Or (Golden Eye )– the award for best documentary across all the sections combined.

This is a considerable achievement, as it eclipsed such films, as Todd Haynes’ ‘The Velvet Underground’ (main Competition section), British filmmaker Andrea Arnold’s ‘Cow’ (Premiere, a new showcase section), Oliver Stone’s ‘JFK revisited’ (also Premiere) and another documentary about India too, ‘Invisible Demons’ by Rahul Jain – and which you can learn more about from the links below.

The US-based Jain’s film played in another new section called Cinema for the Climate.
Mumbai-based Kapadia’s film played in the Directors’ Fortnight strand at the Cannes Film Festival.

This sidebar selection is mostly for up and coming directors and work which is often unconventional and innovative.

Kapadia’s is certainly that, as it isn’t a straightforward documentary and mixes a number of different elements such as “merging reality with fiction, dreams and memories, fantasies and anxieties,” as it says in its festival description – producing an “amorphous narrative” and one which Kapadia discusses with ACV’s Brigitte Leloire Kerackian just after her film’s world premiere on Thursday (July 15) in Cannes and before the announcement of the award on Saturday (July 17) afternoon.

Kapadia is a graduate of the Film and Television Institute of India (Pune) and previously screened a short, ‘Afternoon Clouds’ in the Cinéfondation section, which accepts films from directors learning their craft at accredited film training schools. Her more recent ‘And what is Summer saying’ (2018), another short also screened at the Berlinale that year.
https://www.berlinale-talents.de/bt/talent/payal-kapadia/profile

The original announcement from the Directors Fortnight…

Rahul Jain ‘Invisible Demons’ interview – https://youtu.be/XE6iahI70JM

‘Invisible Demons’ review – https://youtu.be/aVYDLNIRl2Y