Session 1. Payal Kapadia

And What Is the Summer Saying?
Payal Kapadia, India, 2018, 24 min, DCP, B&W, Marathi

A Night of Knowing Nothing
Payal Kapadia, India-France, 2021, 96 min, DCP, colour-B&W, Hindi-Bengali

 

Payal Kapadia is a young filmmaker from India who this year premièred her first work, A Night of Knowing Nothing. Someone (who?) finds some letters in a pigeonhole in a film school in which a young woman, L, writes to her forbidden love, K. L and K are from different castes, and it is impossible for them to be married (even today). In her correspondence L not only sends messages of love and despair, but also news of the struggle K has had to give up, following his parents' orders. Students at the Mumbai film and television institute rise up against the caste system and financial insecurity, joining protests spreading increasingly widely around India. Created with material from her own time at university, made with her friends and colleagues, Kapadia organises a fiction that contains as much melodrama as agit-prop. The short film And What Is the Summer Saying? is an earlier exercise that shares the same universe: being, seeing, observing, discussing and, from these conversations, sounds of time passing, sketching out small scenes and narratives that take place in one summer in Maharashtra district.