Alain Badiou documentary screened at Copenhagen Philosophy Film Festival

Badiou, the documentary made about the French philosopher Alain Badiou, was screened in the programme of the 2026 Philosophy Film Festival held by the Danish Film Institute in Copenhagen.

The film was made by the director Rohan Kalyan together with his brother Gorav Kalyan. The producers describe having been struck by the range of Badiou's thought, and having followed the philosopher's traces through Paris.

Badiou's thought in brief#

Born in 1937, Badiou held the chair of philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure and founded the philosophy department at the University of Paris VIII with Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault and Jean-François Lyotard.

His major work, Being and Event (1988), sets out a striking equation: ontology is mathematics. Everything that can be said about being qua being, on Badiou's account, is said in the language of set theory. Being is not a totality but pure multiplicity.

The central concept that follows from this picture is the event. An event is a rupture that cannot be accounted for within the rules of the existing situation: a revolution, a love, a scientific discovery, a work of art. The event establishes nothing by itself; subjects who show it fidelity set a truth procedure in motion.

Badiou's political position is derived from the same source: what he calls the communist hypothesis is not a model of the state but an insistence that equality can be thought again, as an event.

Where the documentary fits#

Philosophy documentaries have been finding a larger place at festivals in recent years. Badiou's own interests suit the choice: he treats cinema as the mass form of art, which he counts as one of philosophy's four truth procedures, and he writes about it.