A Bright Sun

“Un sol radiant is born from the desire to imagine what is unimaginable. What would the last week of our life be like if we were sure that it was coming to an end? What would we feel, what would we spend our last hours on, which thoughts would we have? Would we like to live every minute that is left, or would we just feel emptiness? Would we face the abyss or avoid it with tricks and anesthesia? What would we take refuge in?

All these questions – and more – come to our minds when we think about the premise of the film. Un sol radiant starts one morning, with only five days before a meteorite hits the Earth and all life on it ends. And although our starting point belongs to science fiction, the story we want to tell emphasizes the emotional journey of the characters during these last days. The nearness of the end brings unknown feelings and conflicts that were previously hidden, but at the same time, everything takes on a new dimension. Trees, flowers, animals, the earth, the air they breathe, they are all part of a life that is coming to an end, of one last breath.

We decided that the best way to tell a phenomenon like this, so big and untraceable, was going deep into something smaller and more familiar. And that is why Un sol radiant tells the story of the end of the world from the experiences of a family, the Verdis, without leaving their home and the nature that surrounds them. We believe that if we explore how the four members of this family feel, people who belong to very different generations, we may be able to get closer to something more universal. Following our desire to go into detail, we decided to avoid the choral story and chose to live this last week from the perspective of Mila, the youngest of the family.

Her look – tender, still clean, without the stains that come with the years, but with a maturity and a deep understanding for her age allows us to see Verdi’s story from a certain freshness and lightness. Mila’s vitality, as well as her way of looking at the world around her, makes a story as dramatic as waiting for the arrival of a meteorite ends up becoming something intimate and natural. However, the weight of the situation and the emotions that appear in Mila and her family slowly filter through the everyday scenes that set the tone of the film.

This project, which began as a final degree project, differs from most fiction feature films in terms of the method of work. Un sol radiant does not respond to the authorial voice of a director or screenwriter but is the result of the creative work of six authors. This method of collaborative work has many positive aspects, but it was a challenge to find a core theme that moved all six of us in the same way. The decision to make a story about the family and how we relate to it comes after months of chaos and skin-deep feelings.

At the beginning of the project, we fell in love with a story about a girl who was trying to protect her family, but we were not able to put it on paper and write down a little bit of everyone’s soul. To solve this, we worked through personal texts, and we found each other again. We found that we all felt similarly about our families, as all the texts appealed to the same way of understanding the bonds that bind us together with the people we love, from discussions with parents because we didn’t understand each other to the hugs in the morning when it’s very cold.

And finally, we took this starting point to tell the story of Mila, exploring the fears and the questions that such a young person would have if she were about to die. Un sol radiant is the portrait of a family that does not always understand each other, that cries, plays, joins and separates but that, in the end, always stays together.”

– The authors of Un sol radiant (A Bright Sun)