100 Sunset: The Rise Of A New Filmmaking Talent

In 100 Sunset, the first feature by Kunsang Kyirong, a fable is told twice. A thief breaks into a monk’s home to steal money. The monk directs him to it, only asking that he “leave some so I can pay my taxes.” The thief complies. But as he departs, the monk scolds him for failing to say thank you. “It is not polite!” The story is small, even funny, but it hangs over the film, reminding us that politeness, gratitude and respect aren’t minor courtesies; they are the glue that holds people together.

The setting is an apartment block in Parkdale, Toronto, home to a tightly knit Tibetan-Canadian community. The building is called 100 Sunset, and the name gives the film both its title and its sense of enclosure. For 18-year-old Kunsel (played by Tenzin Kunsel), this is a world both protective and suffocating. She lives amid beige walls, family rituals, and expectations that are never spoken but always felt. Kunsel barely speaks herself, yet she communicates everything through her face, her silences and the camera’s gaze.

That camera becomes the hinge of the film. In an early scene, Kunsel steals a camcorder and begins filming her neighbours, the routines of the apartment block and, eventually, the wider city. Kyirong weaves this footage into her film so that the audience sees the world through both lenses at once: the professional and the amateur, the director and the character. For Kunsel, the act of filming is both a shield and a form of longing. It creates distance while allowing her to look harder at what she might otherwise turn away from.

Her most sustained subject is Passang (Sonam Choekyi), a vivacious young woman recently married and newly moved into the building. Through Kunsel’s stolen camera we watch her laugh, argue with her husband, sing at karaoke. Their friendship opens cracks in the walls around Kunsel’s life. With Passang, she begins to venture beyond the narrow halls and balconies. The film’s palette changes as it does. Indoors, the images are muted, framed by windows and doors. Outside, Toronto’s streets and subways appear in bolder colours. A grey city becomes, at least briefly, a place of possibility. When the pair venture into the nearby wilderness, the sky is a vast white, the fragmented sunlight on lake almost blinding.

Cinematographer Nikolay Michaylov heightens this contrast. His compositions make Parkdale feel both intimate and claustrophobic, like a home that contains too much history to ever feel empty. When Kunsel steps outdoors, his camera opens with her. The change in rhythm feels earned.

Kyirong is less interested in plot twists than in textures of life. 100 Sunset lingers on overheard conversations, on the communal card games and the dhikuti—a collective lottery where families contribute to a pot that offers a small but life-changing amount of money to one household each month. These scenes are affectionate without being sentimental. They show how interdependence can sustain a community but also heighten its tensions. Gender roles remain fixed: young women are expected to marry and bend to tradition. Passang’s awkward responses to Kunsel’s questions about her marriage–“why do you stay with someone who you don’t like?”—and Passang’s confusion that she could decide not to, carry as much weight as any dramatic confrontation.

At this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, many first-time directors explored similar themes: the experience of young women caught between tradition and autonomy, prejudice and possibility. More than one film ended with a girl dressing as a boy to gain freedom from an oppressive society. 100 Sunset doesn’t travel that road, but it shares the impulse to let us inhabit a world rarely depicted on screen. It extends an invitation, not as spectacle, but as lived reality.

The performances are crucial. Tenzin Kunsel, in her first role, holds the screen by doing almost nothing. Her stillness is magnetic. Sonam Choekyi, by contrast, provides energy and warmth. Together they suggest two possible futures, one that stays, one that leaves. Neither choice is easy.

What makes 100 Sunset remarkable is its refusal to exoticize. The film doesn’t present Tibetan rituals as curiosities, nor does it frame the community as an enclave to be pitied or romanticised. It observes, with patience and care, how people balance tradition and the modern world in which they must reinvent their culture, and how a young woman comes to see herself in that mirror. With this focus, the film doesn’t deliver catharsis. Instead, it gains its quiet power by exploring questions: What does it mean to belong? How do you honor a culture while wanting something beyond it? Is freedom the same as leaving?

100 Sunset is a subtle film, but not a slight one. Like the monk’s story, and the Tibetan customs that are being reshaped in a Toronto high-rise apartment block, the lessons linger. In that small space, Kyirong finds all the vastness of exile, tradition and her desire for freedom. For a debut, it is assured and deeply promising.

Andy Hazel
©FIPRESCI 2025