A Night of Knowing Nothing

  • April 9, 2022 / 16:00
  • April 10, 2022 / 13:30
  • April 17, 2022 / 16:00

Director: Payal Kapadia
France, India, 2021, 96', DCP, color
Hindi, Bengali with Turkish, English subtitles

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. By turns gritty and lyrical, Payal Kapadia’s A Night of Knowing Nothing (2021) is a penetrating look at the politics of education—of film education specifically—as India’s once thriving liberal public sphere yields to sectarian division and chauvinism. On a background of state-sanctioned violence and intimidation, what stands out is Kapadia’s quiet insistence on the necessity of private reflection. Resistance demands fiction, somehow, even as the failure of news media and other democratic institutions leaves no ground for a non-partisan artistic stance.

A Night of Knowing Nothing

A Night of Knowing Nothing

Cuadecuc, Vampir

Cuadecuc, Vampir

Elemental Frequencies

Elemental Frequencies

Symbols

Symbols

Pera Museum’s Cold Front from the Balkans exhibition curated by Ali Akay and Alenka Gregorič brings together contemporary artists from Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro, Romania, Serbia and Slovenia.

Turquerie

Turquerie

Having penetrated the Balkans in the fourteenth century, conquered Constantinople in the fifteenth, and reached the gates of Vienna in the sixteenth, the Ottoman Empire long struck fear into European hearts. 

The Ottoman Way of Serving Coffee

The Ottoman Way of Serving Coffee

Coffee was served with much splendor at the harems of the Ottoman palace and mansions. First, sweets (usually jam) was served on silverware, followed by coffee serving. The coffee jug would be placed in a sitil (brazier), which had three chains on its sides for carrying, had cinders in the middle, and was made of tombac, silver or brass. The sitil had a satin or silk cover embroidered with silver thread, tinsel, sequin or even pearls and diamonds.