– Lam Can-zhao’s compact coming-of-age anthology finds a moving thread of loneliness and emotional confusion across its childhood chapters
Structured as a series of fleeting childhood memories, Lam Can-zhao’s Where the Sun Shines Bright, showcased in the International Competition of this year’s Bishkek International Film Festival, approaches adolescence less as a linear journey than as a collection of emotional bruises. At 68 minutes, the film moves lightly between its different young protagonists, but the feelings it circles are anything but light: absence, solitude, family fractures and the quiet shock of growing up before one has the words to explain what is happening.
The loose framing device centres on an 18-year-old boy standing on the threshold of adulthood, whose memories and observations are reflected in the lives of four children from the same village. The structure is episodic, with the film divided into chapters that follow different young characters as they negotiate small but decisive moments of emotional pressure. This is both the film’s strongest asset and its most visible limitation. On the one hand, the format gives Where the Sun Shines Bright a welcome variety of tones and situations, keeping its pacing fairly sprightly and preventing its recurring melancholy from becoming monotonous. On the other, the brevity of each segment means that few of the characters are allowed to develop beyond the emotional state or situation that defines them.
Still, Lam has a good instinct for pacing. The film rarely drags, and its short, contained episodes are handled with a degree of narrative economy that suits the material. The helmer prefers accumulation over dramatic escalation: a look, a silence, a walk through the village, a child left to process something alone. At its best, the film finds a moving common thread between these fragments, suggesting that childhood is not always a protected space, but often a place where pain is absorbed before it can be fully understood.
The results, however, are uneven. Some chapters are more precise and emotionally convincing than others, and the film occasionally feels a little too gentle, too carefully polished, as if afraid to leave its characters in a truly uncomfortable place. A greater degree of roughness might have made the work more piercing. What is missing is not craft, exactly, but a more genuine sense of friction.
Even so, the performances are one of the pic’s most persuasive elements. The young, mostly non-professional cast members bring an unforced naturalness to the screen, and Lam wisely avoids pushing them towards melodrama. Visually, too, Where the Sun Shines Bright is overall neat and varied. The cinematography, courtesy of Gou Haokun and Pan Wenhua, gives each chapter a slightly distinct texture, while maintaining a coherent sense of place and mood. It is polished, sometimes perhaps too much so, but never anonymous.
In the end, Lam’s film is a curious and worthwhile work: a tender, compact anthology about left-behind childhood, loneliness and the hesitant passage into adulthood. Its uniqueness and emotional clarity make it worth watching, even if its uneven chapters and limited depth keep it from becoming the fully resonant portrait it clearly aims to be.
Where the Sun Shines Bright was produced by China’s Shanxian Media, Switzerland’s Movie Sushi, Canada’s Treasure Beth Pictures, China’s Bai’s Pictures and Malaysia’s Emuse Pictures.
