Cinema Travelogue

Image Credit: Courtesy of TIFF

There is a sense of kinship in seeing a familiar location onscreen; a place one passes by so frequently that its presence and unique spatial features have become an impasse and nothing but vagueness, having lost their shape due to time. This is where cinema comes in, bringing a fresh perspective to an old place, a new way of seeing the old, like the strange familiarity one feels when looking at a video someone else has taken of you. Despite the fact that one has seen this face in the mirror every day of one’s life, you see something completely different. All this is to explain the grin on my face when I saw the Yonge-Bloor TTC station featured in Kunsang Kyirong’s directorial debut, 100 Sunset.

Set mostly in an apartment complex in Parkdale eponymous to its title, 100 Sunset is fueled by a sense of alienation and the melancholia of being an outsider. The film presents a hermetic social milieu of Tibetan immigrants near Toronto that maintains their cultural identity even in a distant land. They decorate themselves and their apartments according to Buddhist symbols, communicate in their own language, and operate in their own rule of commerce. The biggest conflict of the film is a monthly event where each household bids into a pool of money, and the highest bidder takes home the entire prize. What each household does and where they work daily remains abstract throughout the film, but all of them conjoin in a communal board game room where they play cards and share gossip.

Only when the main character Kunsel (Tenzin Kunsel) – a taciturn girl with the hobby of petty theft- decides to venture outdoors with her newest stolen prize, an old camcorder, with her newfound best friend Passang (Sonam Choekyi), do we get to see exterior architectures and transportation infrastructures that resemble how Toronto is usually filmed. This sort of dissonance between the familiar and the cultural specificity fuels the portrayal of the Asian diaspora in 100 Sunset. The consistent melancholia is attributed to the double effect of distance – first, the removal of one from their home country, and second, the confinement to one’s new home because it becomes the only place one can experience their own culture.

The double effect results in a dichotomy, both in character and form. Between the two girls, Passang is married and more open, despite being only a few years older. Her kinship with Kunsel is initiated through others in the community, suggesting that she provide companionship to the isolated Kunsel. On the opposite end, Kunsel’s presence is very muted, and this quality is contagious throughout the interior scenes, where everyone speaks in a similar, well-mannered cadence within medium shots. So, it’s not a coincidence that when the film shows footage that Kunsel filmed of Passang, where its form transitions from passive representation to an active act of looking, it exhibits a greater sense of freedom that the two girls feel when they are going out on their own.

Shot by cinematographer Nikolay Michaylov, a major talent in the Canadian film scene, known for his collaborations with directors such as Kazik Kadwanski, Sofia Bohdanowicz, and Antoine Bourges, the camcorder visuals provides a distinct texture. The film opens with older footage from its previous owner, signifying its role in aiding remembrance and documentation of moments. But when Kunsel gets her hand on the tool, the footage interlaced throughout the film becomes much more active and attains multiple roles. At times, it insinuates an insidious Peeping Tom quality as it probes through the curtains of Passang’s neighbouring apartment window; at times, it acts as a savoury glimpse of real, bonding moments between the two ladies as Kunsel documents their most joyous outings for food or goofing around on subways; other times, it surveys the snowy landscape as a means to discover uncanny beauty in mostly desolate urban spaces. The camcorder became a way of seeing for Kunsel, and her obsession with it is synonymous with the shapeless Toronto and the neglectful adults surrounding her – seeing everything through a camera might be the only way out for something new.

The camcorder footages rely on mysteries: what exactly is Kunsel trying to capture when she picks up the camcorder and points it at Passang, as well as how Passang, being the subject on the other end of the camcorder, responds to this act and the ambiguity of her awareness in the first place. The mysteries fuel the contemplation between the two young girls, who have been under a closed-off, machismo society occupied by masculine dominance and familial obligations; the camcorder is the magnet that keeps both sides drawn in. Between the magnetism, there is a way out, which was previously deemed impossible without the camera eye.

Ultimately, what is most powerful from 100 Sunset is how a camcorder can operate as a secret passage, a clandestine exchange of emotions and feelings similar to how Kunsel and Passang can exchange their deepest secrets on the subway in their own language that the remaining English-speaking Torontonians would not understand. So despite the ambiguous relationship between the two girls, getting lost as the film dives headlong into its mystery, a film that manages to craft its own private language is a treasure to be found.