Director Payal Kapadia's A Night Of Knowing Nothing at will be screened at Cannes Directors' Fortnight, a non-competitive section that runs parallel to the main Cannes Film Festival. This year's edition is scheduled between July 7 and 17 after last year's edition was cancelled on account of the Coronavirus pandemic.
The official description of A Night Of Knowing Nothing reads, "L, a university student in India, writes letters to her estranged lover, while he is away. Through these letters, we get a glimpse into the drastic changes taking place around her. Merging reality with fiction, dreams, memories, fantasies and anxieties, an amorphous narrative unfolds." The last time one of Kapadia's films was at Cannes was in 2017 when her 13-minute short, Afternoon Clouds, was selected to compete in the Cinefondation category. It was the only Indian film in a competitive category that year, chosen from among 2600 submissions from film schools across the world. The short, which revolved around a 60-year-old widow who lives with her Nepali domestic help, began as Kapadia's second-year Film and Television Institute of India project, two years earlier.
Other Indian films to be screened at the Directors' Fortnight include Anurag Kashyap's epic gangland film Gangs of Wasseypur in 2012 and thriller Ugly in 2013.
Here are all the other films playing at the 2021 Directors' Fortnight:
A Chiara (Jonas Carpignano)
Ali & Ava (Clio Barnard)
Clara Sola (Nathalie Álvarez Mesen)
A Brighter Tomorrow (Yassine Qnia)
The Tsugua Diaries (Miguel Gomes, Maureen Fazendeiro)
The Employer and the Employee (Manuel Nieto Zas)
The Braves (Anaïs Volpé)
Europa (Haider Rashid)
Furuta (Pietro Marcello, Francesco Munzi)
Integralded (Radu Muntean)
Hit the Road (Panah Panahi)
Magnetic Beat (Vincent Maël Cardona)
The Hill where Lionesses Roar (Luàna Bajrami)
Medusa (Anita Rocha da Silveira)
Our Men (Rachel Lang)
Murina (Antoneta Alamat Kusijanović)
Neptune Frost (Saul Williams, Anisia Uzeyman)
Between Two Worlds (Emmanuel Carrère)
The Tale of King Crab (Alessio Rigo de Righi, Matteo Zoppis)
Fragments (Jean-Gabriel Périot)
The Souvenir Part II (Joanna Hogg)
Ripples of Life (Shujun Wei)
The Sea Ahead (Ely Dagher)