100 Sunset review: a dreamlike drift through Toronto's Tibetan community

Kunsang Kyirong's debut feature 100 Sunset takes place almost entirely inside Toronto's tight-knit Tibetan community, and it begins from a position of deliberate withholding: not much happens, and very little is explained.

The Canadian-Tibetan film-maker casts nonprofessional actors throughout her first film as director. The setting is a grey slab high-rise nicknamed Sunset Towers, where the Tibetan residents, as the review puts it, "seem to know everything about each other's business." The uncle of the household, Geysar (Tsering Bawa), is the building's caretaker and runs card games out of the apartment he shares with his niece.

That niece is Kunsel (Kenzin Kunsel), an introverted 18-year-old who anchors the film. She is shy to the point of wordlessness. She is also a compulsive thief, rifling handbags and coat pockets with a knack for taking her victims' most precious belongings.

What does the stolen camcorder change?

The pivot of the film is small: one night Kunsel steals a camcorder. The shaky footage she then films offers the viewer an inkling into her interior life — the film's only direct access to it. There is, the review notes, "the faintest flicker of voyeurism" as she begins spying on her neighbours from her window.

Her gaze settles on Passang (Sonam Choekyi), a woman only a couple of years older, who has recently moved into number 100 with her husband. The two become friends. They ride the subway to the wintry countryside outside Toronto. They take an English language class together. Passang is older, more experienced, clued up — and the film quietly measures the distance between the two women.

Where the money goes

Then the plot teases something louder. A suitcase stuffed with $200,000 in cash goes missing — the payout from an informal savings and lending scheme run among the building's residents. The setup offers real potential for action and suspense.

Kyirong declines it. The drama of the missing money, like the film itself, "fades like a vapour trail in the sky." What remains is a mood of disorientation and dislocation that, the review suggests, may be a reflection of Kunsel's own state of mind.

That refusal is the film's signature and, for skeptics, its limitation. The debut announces a film-maker more interested in drifting than in resolving — elliptical, elusive, dreamlike by design.

Whether that suffices depends on the viewer's tolerance for stories that dissolve on contact. Kyirong has made a first feature about a community rarely seen on screen; what she will do with a plot, next time, remains an open question.