Tenzin Kunsei in 100 Sunset.mdff/Supplied
100 Sunset
Written and directed by Kunsang Kyirong
Starring Tenzin Kunsel and Sonam Choekyi
Classification N/A; 99 minutes
Opens at Toronto’s Revue Cinema May 1, with other cities to follow throughout May
Critic’s Pick
If Toronto is indeed a city of neighbourhoods, as so many civic historians insist, then it is one that filmmakers have only managed to capture a tiny sliver of. We might be in a golden age of Toronto-playing-itself representation on the big screen, but there are so many corners of the city that remain undocumented or underexposed. Take the west-end area of Parkdale, a wildly disparate patch of newly arrived immigrants and slowly, stubbornly gentrifying real estate that also boasts the largest Tibetan community outside of Asia.
While Toronto’s Little Tibet received the cinematic treatment in the well-intentioned but slight 2023 thriller Tenzin, the community gets the intimate, tense, and full-hearted portrait it deserves with 100 Sunset, the immensely impressive debut feature from filmmaker Kunsang Kyirong.
Born in Vancouver to Tibetan parents – Kyirong would travel to the Indian refugee camp in Tezu, Arunachal Pradesh, where her mother grew up every other summer – the director moved to Parkdale in 2021, where two of her aunts lived in a high-rise apartment complex given the evocative nickname “Sunset Tower.” And that is where much of Kyirong’s film takes place, the drama following a shy teenage girl named Kunsel (Tenzin Kunsel) who is hiding a secret addiction to kleptomania.
After procuring a video camera, Kunsel alternates between spying on her neighbours and striking up an uneasy friendship with the bold and perhaps reckless Passang (Sonam Choekyi), who has just moved into the tower with her much older husband. The pair’s relationship builds with an intense, even smouldering curiosity – and as Kunsel and Passang reveal themselves to each other, so, too, does Kyirong gradually expose her audience to life inside a vast but insular community.
Kunsel and Sonam Choekyi in 100 Sunset.mdff/Supplied
At times, it feels as if Kunsel’s restlessness – with her home life, with the confines of tradition, even with the very geography of Sunset Tower – is mirrored in the film’s occasionally jittery, frenzied aesthetic. There are moments in which you simply want to grab the film and plop it down in one place – to sit it still, to let it rest.
Yet the flip side to Kyirong’s energy is that she has created a world that feels thrillingly alive and real, organic and compellingly messy. Working with some of the local film scene’s top talents – including cinematographer Nikolay Michaylov (Matt & Mara, Concrete Valley) and editor Brendan Mills (The Heirloom, Lucky Lu) – Kyirong pushes the limits of her micro-budget production to the brink. There is a fire inside of 100 Sunset that feels as if it could engulf the entirety of Toronto, forget Parkdale.
Kunsel in 100 Sunset.mdff/Supplied
The director also wrings tremendous, deeply felt performances from her largely untested cast, with Kunsel (the actress, not the character) handily carrying the film during its most heavy, even experimental moments.
When 100 Sunset screened at last year’s edition of the Dharamshala International Film Festival in the Himalayas – a homecoming of sorts following a world premiere at TIFF – the event’s lead organizer proclaimed the movie to be a “landmark moment for Tibetan cinema in exile.” I’ll go one further and label it an exciting landmark for Toronto movies in general, and Canadian film at large.