Amar Kanwar’s ‘A Night of Prophecy’ is a conversation about a story that finds itself paralleled and repeated across regions, cycles of violence and modes of resistance in India. Music and poetry becomes the very texture through which histories of excesses against the marginalized are felt and extended outwards. Kanwar himself asks, “if different poetic narratives could merge together, allowing us to see a more universal language of symbols and meanings… would there be a moment of prophecy?”. Delicately intimate and beautifully fragile in some moments, while audacious and collusive in others, Kanwar’s film is a poignant question that spurs us to rethink our expectations from the world we inhabit. A Night of Prophecy is about sketches of a possible future, as much it is about the traces of the past.