Riots and protests at an Indian film school, told in letters written by student L to her lover K, in which she reflects on what’s happening around her. While government forces gradually push back the rebellion, L realizes that she will never receive an answer because K belongs to a higher caste. The anonymous lines are wistful echoes of a love tragedy in times of the resurgence of a nationalistic class society.

Director Payal Kapadia steeps the visual material, compiled from a variety of sources and testifying to long, draining nights of protest, but also to great determination and a youthful exuberance, almost consistently in grainy black and white. Even mobile phone or surveillance camera footage are thus aesthetically related to 16mm student films from past decades. But against this contrast the immediate, unfinished nature of what is shown becomes all the more apparent, referencing the complex dialogue between a fragile memory and a tumultuous present that goes on in the film. A present in which questions of artistic representation, but also of personal responsibility, must be renegotiated.

On a moonless night, a cheeky bull escapes from his herd. He dashes through fields and over hills until he finally stops at a pond, where a piece of paper on which a poem is emerging attaches itself to him. The bull shakes off the paper and sneaks into town, where he watches people at their nocturnal business. He witnesses a police investigation, listens in on two truck drivers and observes the theft of a bus stop shelter. All these experiences are accompanied by the narrator’s poetic comments and culminate in a hilarious singing sequence, complete with a dance and performance number by the bull.

Meanwhile, the people in the town are in an uproar about the undetectable moon. They search, discuss and protest. But the moon stays missing – until the bull transforms himself at the end of his journey.