Give and Take
By Sarah Fensom
100 Sunset
Dir. Kunsang Kyriong, Canada, no distributor
100 Sunset screens April 25 at Museum of the Moving Image’s as part of the 2026 First Look festival.
Kunsel (Tenzin Kunsel), a teenager who lives with her aunt and uncle in the towering Toronto apartment building that’s home to a community of Tibetan immigrants, is a thief. The protagonist of Kunsang Kyriong’s debut feature, 100 Sunset, steals things from the coat pockets and bags of her neighbors as they gather in local Himalayan restaurants and for card games in each other’s apartments. The items she takes—a rare nine-eyed Dzi stone that’s thought to bring luck to its owner, a MiniDV camera used to capture endearing footage of a neighbor’s ex-wife, a suitcase full of money raised by her uncle—are not insignificant; they’re direct representations of what her community values. The second of the Five Precepts in Tibetan Buddhism addresses stealing, advising practitioners not to take what has not been given. Kyriong’s film, a wintry work of slow cinema, is a meditation on what is taken, what is freely given, and what cannot be returned.
The Tibetan diaspora began in the early 1950s, growing substantially with the 1959 Uprising and flight of the Dalai Lama from Lhasa to India. In the intervening years, amidst multiple waves of emigration and the establishment of their government-in-exile, Tibetans have fought to preserve the cultural traditions, language, and religious practices that have become restricted in their home country. The late 1990s saw a large relocation of Tibetans to the Parkdale neighborhood of Toronto, making the enclave the largest concentration of Tibetans in North America. Serving as the setting of Kyriong’s film, Parkdale, and its fictional 100 Sunset building, is presented as a place that’s isolated, both from Toronto’s blustery cold and from the heavy-handed influence of other cultures. The community members trust and rely on each other. They contribute to a Dukuti, the traditional Nepalese credit and savings system paying out big to one high-bidding member at a time, run by Kunsel’s Uncle Geysar (Tsering Bawa). They keep an eye on each other—between English classes, Kunsel watches both a neighbor’s young daughter and her elderly mother. And the community members gossip about each other incessantly, never mentioning anyone from elsewhere in the city.
Kunsel, however, speaks very little in either Tibetan or English. She’s taciturn but not entirely withdrawn, her saucer eyes roving over her surroundings as if she’s recording the events and conversations her reserved nature won’t let her participate in. When she steals the camera from her statuesque neighbor, Gyatso (Tsering Gyatso), it morphs into a new appendage. Filming becomes her mode of connection, her lifeline, a way to probe deeper into a world that she wants to rebel against. When Passang (Sonam Cheokyi), an alluring and mysterious 25-year-old, moves into the building with her much older husband, Kunsel finds her second form of liberation. The two young women become fast friends, and soon they’re giggling in English class, taking the train around the city, and sharing intimacies on walks in its wooded environs. Kunsel films her friend and their adventures, occasionally in manic, unexpected angles that recall the protagonists of Hideaki Anno’s Love & Pop (1998), who quickly snap photos of each other as they run around Tokyo, other times she shoots Passang up close, and a bit out of focus, as if blinded by a romantic gaze.
But Kunsel steals shots, too. In fact, they’re the only things she’s caught taking. Passang finds footage of herself saved on the camera that Kunsel filmed through her window. She’s in a towel and applying lotion, completely oblivious to being observed. This discovery changes the way Passang sees Kunsel, and catalyzes the older girl’s decision to ask her neighbor to steal what will essentially lead to her freedom. Kunsel’s heist of the Dukuti money may seem at first of little consequence to the teenager—she’s never accused or apprehended. But really, her sentence is to stay in 100 Sunset alone without Passang, among her people, yet alienated.
Building on her short work, like Dhulpa (2022), which followed a group of Tibetan immigrants from India who work in a laundry facility in Canada, Kyirong’s film captures the particular sense of ennui that comes from being separated from the implicit acceptance and normalcy of home. And like the recent anthology film State of Statelessness from the Drung Tibetan Filmmakers’ Collective, 100 Sunset subtly unpacks how this is a particularly Tibetan phenomenon. The film’s gentle pacing, owing to the graceful editing by Brendan Mills (Lucky Lu) and Nikolay Michaylov’s pensive camera, builds a sense of isolation and tension between Kunsel and her neighbors and surroundings. For films like Matt and Mara (2024) and Measures for a Funeral (2024), Michaylov has been tasked with capturing Deragh Campbell, a Canadian actress known for her portrayals of steely introverts—projects that have clearly prepared the DP for this one.
In 100 Sunset, Kunsel’s reticent performance and deep, meaningful gazes are supplemented by the footage she captures, adding dimension to her character. Woven throughout the film, the DV footage can seem to rip through Michaylov’s long, meditative takes like a burst of energy. The Kunsel reflected in the DV cam sequences isn’t the girl we see sitting alone in the apartment and staring; instead, we watch her feet pound the pavement or woodland path as she’s running, the camera bobbing like it’s her own heaving breath. In one of the film’s most arresting sequences, this vigor and the languid mystery of the film’s more grounded shots coalesce. The girls are seen talking in a snowy landscape just beyond train tracks, their voices low and gestures intimate. A train passes, momentarily obscuring them, its whizzing cars rendered as blurry abstract streaks of color—a Gerhard Richter painting in motion. In that moment, the nameless train could be going anywhere in the world. Perhaps it could steal the girls away, taking them somewhere they’d consider home.