100 Sunset review, elliptical, elusive drama dreamlike through Toronto’s tight-knit Tibetan community

Kunsang Kyirong’s debut feature fades like a vapour trail in a mood of disorientation and dislocation

N ot much happens and very little is explained in this elliptical, elusive drama by Canadian-Tibetan film-maker Kunsang Kyirong. Her film, her feature directing debut, takes us inside the tight-knit world of Toronto’s Tibetan community, using a cast of nonprofessional actors. It drifts in a dreamlike manner as it follows introverted 18-year-old Kunsel (Kenzin Kunsel), who lives in a grey slab high-rise block nicknamed Sunset Towers; its Tibetan residents seem to know everything about each other’s business. Her uncle Geysar (Tsering Bawa) is the caretaker, and runs card games out of their apartment.

Kunsel is shy to the point of wordlessness; she is also a compulsive thief, rifling through handbags and coat pockets, with a knack for pilfering her victims’ most precious belongings. One night she steals a camcorder, and the shaky footage she subsequently films provides an inkling into her interior life, there is the faintest flicker of voyeurism as she begins spying on her neighbours, filming from her window. In particular, her gaze rests on Passang (Sonam Choekyi), a woman only a couple of years older than herself, who recently moved into number 100 with her husband.

The two women become friends, travelling on the subway to the wintry countryside outside Toronto, and take an English language class together. Passang is older, more experienced, clued up. There follows a storyline that offers the potential for action and suspense, involving a suitcase stuffed with $200,000 in cash, the payout from an informal savings and lending scheme in the building. But in the end, the drama of the missing money, like the film itself, fades like a vapour trail in the sky, though its mood of disorientation and dislocation is perhaps a reflection of Kunsel’s state of mind.