100 Sunset Review: Subtle Diaspora Drama

Kunsang Kyirong’s 100 Sunset is an enchanting journey into the heart of Toronto’s Tibetan diaspora from an artist with a keen eye for detail.

Kunsel (Tenzin Kunsel) is an introverted young woman, almost a stranger within her own community, let alone the metropolis outside. Early on, she steals a video camera from another resident, an act that sparks two intersecting new habits, petty theft and filming her neighbours. Then she meets Passang (Sonam Choekyi), a woman close to Kunsel’s age who arrives in the apartment complex with her much older husband. With a shared, if unspoken, dissatisfaction and sense of yearning, they rove around Toronto attending English classes and discovering their neighbourhood and wider city together.

With the help of editor Brendan Millst and DP Nikolay Michaylov, a man not unused to shooting Toronto, Kyirong creates a collage of angles and perspectives whereby Kunsel’s camera becomes a digital conduit through which we experience her perception of her surroundings. The protagonist’s shaky amateur recordings accompany still, voyeuristic images of balconies and windows, alongside cosy interior shots as the older members of the community cram into apartments to play card games and put the world to rights; it’s like watching Aftersun, Rear Window and In the Mood for Love all at once.

Kyirong patently lives and breathes this city and its neighbourhoods, and has an intimate understanding of the characters that populate it, as evidenced by her casting two first-time actors in the lead roles. Kunsel and Choekyi both hail from the real-life community depicted in the film and it shows. Their interplay on screen is charming, though tinged with an undercurrent of distrust – Passang is the only one who knows it’s Kunsel stealing from their neighbours. The kleptomaniacal protagonist is particularly mysterious, interpreted so subtly as to make her thoughts and emotions almost entirely impenetrable.

The film is a series of meandering snapshots and so it fumbles a little as it is forced to tie things together in a final act that hinges on the outcome of a much-anticipated dhikuti, a bidding game in which the winner will take home big money. Its pacing may test even the most ardent fans of slow cinema and the intentionally low stakes of the action, if we can call it that, don’t lend themselves to the climax Kyirong attempts to assemble. But if the emotional beats don’t hit as hard as they could, we are at least left with plenty of ideas, courtesy of Kunsel and Passang’s Canadian immersion via screen culture and a recurring parable about a thief and a monk, all communicated through imagery that lasts long in the mind.

Some will be put off by how much it makes the audience work for the significance behind its images, but like our enigmatic protagonist, 100 Sunset is richly layered and quietly brilliant. Kyirong’s understanding of space and its relation to people serves her well in this intelligent depiction of two young women in an environment that offers them something tantalisingly new. For most audiences, however, the excitement lies just as much within the walls of the titular apartment block as outside them – it’s an enlightening window into a community we barely know at all.

100 Sunset had its World Premiere at TIFF on September 6, 2025. The film will be screened at the Vancouver International Film Festival on October 3.