Cinephilia is, not surprisingly, a favourite subject of film directors, and it has a tendency to manifest itself on screen in nostalgic contexts that teeter on uncritical wistfulness. Here, however, Payal Kapadia’s kaleidoscopic, Cannes prize-winning documentary unlatches cinephilia from its fetishistic shackles as it chronicles the wave of student protests that exploded under the nationalist rule of India’s prime minister Narendra Modi. Love for the moving image – and love for artistic creativity – marches hand in hand with the fight for political freedom.

Threaded together by fictitious letters between two film students who have ended their intercaste relationship, A Night of Knowing Nothing lends a melancholic intimacy to the 2015 student strike at Kapadia’s alma mater, the Film and Television Institute of India, after Modi’s appointment of a right wing former actor as the university’s new chairman. The dissent is captured in passionate bursts; the juxtaposition of tranquil, domestic dormitory life and cacophonous political shouts accentuate the fervent conviction of the latter. When Muslim and lower-caste students suffer maltreatment, the meaning of a state-funded artistic education is called into question.

Culled from a wide range of audiovisual materials including home videos, archival footage, and CCTV recordings, the film adds a textural dimension to the images, most of which are moulded into a grainy, black-and-white analogue look. Tangible tactility is key here: in the opening of the film, students dance together in front of a screen projection of Indian films, and the same swaying bodies pour into the streets, as they stand up to state injustice and police brutality. As their chants reference revolutionary Soviet film-makers – “Eisenstein, Pudovkin ... we shall fight, we shall win” – they breathe new life into the dusty canon of cinema history, translating youthful love for the medium into direct political action and solidarity.

• A Night of Knowing Nothing is released on 1 April in cinemas.