Tracing Golden Eye winner’s Kolkata connect – Times of India

KOLKATA: Payal Kapadia’s ‘A Night of Knowing Nothing’, which won the Oeil d’or (Golden Eye) award for best documentary at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, has a strong Kolkata connection.
Ranabir Das, a former student of Don Bosco Park Circus and the documentary’s cinematographer and editor, has walked the Cannes red carpet alongside the director. Moinak Bose, a former student of Scottish Church College and St Xavier’s Collegiate School, is the film’s sound designer while Gobardanga’s theatre actor Bhumisuta Das has done its voice over.
Kapadia, Ranabir and Bose are alumni of the Film and Television Institute of India while Bhumisuta graduated from the National School of Drama in 2019.
Described by the director as a “found footage film”, the documentary was screened as part of the Directors’ Fortnight section, which runs alongside the main festival. In the documentary, 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.
Describing his Cannes experience, Ranabir said, “More than the red carpet, just being at the festival was such a great experience, more so after months of restricted movement. It is great to get to watch the films of the masters I have idolized and so many exciting new film-makers. What is more special is to present your film to an audience that is so appreciative and hungry for cinema.”
Ranabir’s parents still live in Kolkata. Director Anik Dutta took to Facebook to share how Ranabir was his “favourite model” after he bought his first SLR and was the youngest crew member of ‘Bhooter Bhobishyot’. “Ray could not go to receive the Palme d’or personally in 1956 but he would’ve been happy to see a boy from his city walking the red carpet at Cannes,” Dutta wrote on Facebook. Touched by this comment, Ranabir said he learnt a lot while working on ‘Bhooter Bhobishyot’. “It was the first feature-length film I worked on. I learnt most of the basics of cinema, both in terms of form and practice, from Dutta and cinematographer Avik Mukhopadhyay,” he said from Marseilles where the documentary is being screened at FID.
Incidentally, L’s character is Bengali, but she lives in Pune. Bhumisuta, who has done the voice over for L, could not make it to Cannes. Primarily associated with Gobardanga Naksha, she has acted in productions like ‘Binodini’ and ‘Shubha’ and also worked in Anuradha Kapur’s ‘Daughters Opera’ and Devashis Makhija’s short film.
“This is not like a regular documentary. I went to Mumbai for 10 days of work. My voice over was partly in Hindi and partly in Bengali. Instead of a professional voice over artist, they wanted someone who could relate to their experience,” she said.