Acceptance and the Tibetan Diaspora On-Screen

Across her varied work, artist and filmmaker Kunsang Kyirong seeks to explore the universal themes hiding within immigrant stories. With a modest budget and an uncanny level of community support, the Tibetan Canadian filmmaker pulled together her first feature length film, 100 Sunset, which highlights a Tibetan diasporic community living in Parkdale, Toronto. By working with first-time actors from around the area, she manages to bring to life a group of people largely underrepresented in film.

Kyirong, who started off in charcoal animation, has followed an unorthodox path into live-action filmmaking. Her first foray into the medium was the animated 2020 short, Yarlung, which was featured in Tricycle’s 2022 Buddhist Shorts Film Festival as well as the Rubin Museum’s 2024 show Reimagine: Himalayan Art Now. Later, her 2022 live-action short, Dhulpa, about the romantic entanglements of a group of Tibetans immigrants who arrive in Vancouver, Canada, to work together in a laundry facility, marked her transition from animator to director.

With 100 Sunset, we follow Kunsel, a young introverted woman living amongst an enclave of Tibetan immigrants in a west Toronto apartment complex. Her uncle organizes the dhikuti—a low-interest collective money loaning system—making her family a pillar of the community. But Kunsel herself exists as an outsider, speaking very little while constantly spying on and stealing from her neighbors. However, things begin to change when she befriends Passang, another young newcomer with a much older husband and an even stronger will.

Kyirong spoke to Tricycle about the film ahead of its world premiere at the 50th Toronto International Film Festival.

Will you start by telling me about why you set out to make this film and what the inspiration was behind it? I think a large inspiration is a lifetime of observations of growing up within the Tibetan diasporic community. But also a more structural inspiration was this book by Renqiu Yu that focused on this Chinese hand laundrymen collective money loaning system called whey. Because I had read this book, when I started to learn about other collective money loaning systems within the Tibetan community, the sparks really got going and I started writing the structure of the film. I’m also really drawn to female characters. In this movie, I wanted to portray how we’re attracted to different personalities, and I tried to create a balance between these two young women.

And how did you find the process of translating the Tibetan diaspora community’s essence from real life to on-screen? There were a lot of personalities that I wanted to depict, and some were also inspired from the late Pema Tseden’s films. I was thinking about certain types of Tibetan stereotypes that I had never seen before. When I watched Jinpa, I saw this kind of rugged Tibetan cowboy-like character who I’ve seen within the community pretty often, but I’ve never really seen on-screen. And then the script was also written while getting to know each person that we had cast for the different roles, so every character was based on a lot of quality time that was spent during the preproduction stages of the film.

Do you want to talk more about that preproduction stage, how you assembled all these actors and built the characters? I began casting with two friends of mine, Chemi Lhamo and a Tibetan Buddhist monk named Khenpo Ngawang Woser. We hosted auditions at the Tibetan Cultural Centre in Parkdale. We were, in a way, cold-casting within the community. Of the two young leads, the one who plays Passang, Sonam Choekyi, was a server at a restaurant that I had frequented in the neighborhood. And then Tenzin Kunsel, who plays Kunsel, we met through Khenpo Ngawang Woser—she was the daughter of a friend of his. For almost every single one of them, it was their first time acting, except for Gesar, who plays Kunsel’s uncle. We would get together on the weekends, and then I developed their characters while getting to know their personalities.

And circling back to talking about female-led stories, that was one of my favorite aspects of the film—that really intimate and sort of complicated relationship between Kunsel and Passang. Was there any deeper inspiration behind writing this friendship? Yeah, some film references were Fat Girl by Catherine Breillat, The Virgin Suicides by Sofia Coppola, and also Love & Pop by Hideaki Anno. I studied the female relationships that I’m drawn to. I worked with two young women that had very different personalities, and focused on understanding what that type of relationship would look like between these two people, and integrated that into the larger script. It was already kind of written into the script, and then it came down to finding two young women that could maybe resemble these characteristics while adding more the further I got to know them.

I also wanted to talk about how in the film there are a lot of Buddhist items and altars that are shown. And there are also some Buddhist themes that pop up, especially in the speech that Passang’s husband makes at the end of the movie. In what ways was it important to you to infuse elements of Buddhism into the story? One thing that the filmmaker Pema Tseden had mentioned while working on Tibetan stories was how it was hard to separate the Tibetan people from Buddhism, because Buddhism is so interwoven within Tibetan society. The way that I wanted to integrate Buddhism was not so much in a way that explicitly focused on Buddhist elements but instead how Buddhist culture is integrated within these characters’ lives—how there’s this acceptance that takes place throughout the film. Without giving too much away, the speech that is told at the end of the film—a rewriting of a famous Milarepa poem—goes back to what I mentioned earlier. How various characters throughout the film, because of their circumstances, have to accept their fate. As for the Buddhist items and altars that are shown, these were owned by the actual Tibetan households and locations that we filmed in.

I love how this movie takes place in Toronto and will be debuting at the Toronto International Film Festival. Do you have any feelings about that? Oh, I’m so excited. It’s really incredible to have the debut in the city where we made the movie, so that we can really celebrate with the community that is on-screen, and also behind the screen through the restaurants and the households. It’s truly a celebration.

100 Sunset screens Saturday, September 6, at the TIFF Lightbox and on Sunday, September 7, at the Scotiabank Theatre Toronto. For more information and showtimes, visit the Toronto Film Festival’s official website.