The Colour of the Sun: A Dreamy Coming-of-Age Film

Canadian director Xavier Tera sits down with producers Jeremy O Harris and Janie Chartier at Venice Film Festival to discuss his buzzed-about debut, set on a Japanese island paradise with a looming US military presence

The opening of Xavier Tera’s dreamy, lyrical coming-of-age film The Colour of the Sun could not be more pointed: the all-eclipsing roar of a passing military aircraft interrupts an Okinawan school’s lesson on the American occupation. Set on a small island in southwestern Japan, this debut feature is a drama of divides, from fantasy and reality, to two contrasting cultures and starkly different varieties of masculinity.

Like elsewhere in the world, the US airbase is a station from which personnel can commit egregious crimes, essentially with immunity. “If a military [member] assaults or rapes a woman, they just go home,” says one of the film’s producers, Janie Chartier, when I sit down with her, Tera and fellow producer Jeremy O Harris (the playwright behind Slave Play and producer of gems like Zola) after the film’s Venice premiere – now considered one of the festival’s biggest breakouts.

The rumblings of discontent caused by this US military presence – one of the largest in the world – provides the fraught backdrop to the teenage years of Kamei (first-timer Naoto Shimajiri, who is effortless in the role). The angsty, symbolically colour-blind high-schooler has already lost his father (how, exactly, is unknown) but his world is about to be further upended as scrappy American airbase kid Colin (West Mulholland) crashes into his social circle.

To assemble his young cast, Tera enlisted a local producer two years before filming began to scout out natural talent and help interweave local dialect into the script. “I was looking for [someone who had] the character within them rather than them performing someone else,” explains Tera. They happened upon Shimajiri when another cast member, Yuma Taira, put her boyfriend forward for the part, and they wound up playing a fictional on-off couple, Kamei and Sayaka, in the film. On his astounding debut performance, Tera enthuses: “He’s never even wanted to act. He didn’t even dance at high school.”

A molten love triangle of sorts forms between Kamei, Sayaka and Colin. As well as adjusting to his growing awareness of the American colonial presence, Kamei gets to grips with his burgeoning sexuality. Such themes were what enticed Harris – who met the director when Tera photographed him for a GQ Japan shoot – to the project. “It’s not just this generation that has this sense of alienation of self and fear of [whether] they’re doing the right thing or not,” Harris reflects. “That deep repression affected me when I was Kamei’s age – the amount of times I didn’t know whether I wanted to kiss someone or be them. What 16-year-old knows what their sexuality is, anyway? There are so many coming-of-age movies where that is so static, and I actually think that so many of the things about our youths are way more fluid.”

Shot with a low-level fixed camera reminiscent of Yasujiro Ozu’s work, Kamei’s discomfort around his sexuality, particularly his nascent feelings towards Colin, surface in some memorably uneasy scenes set on the airbase and in a love hotel. “There’s nothing more queer than having a bunch of men get together in general,” insists Harris, who, like Colin, was a “military brat” who grew up on an American airbase. “I think a military base with so many men makes everything really violent towards women because of how homosociality makes people go crazy. But also it gets real gay. I feel like the only boys I knew that actually got invited to the circle jerks were the ones on the football team. The boy in the drama club never got invited.”

Through Sayaka, that threat of male violence becomes palpable. Drawing in elements of magic realism, she frequently vanishes without a trace or falls off the map, leaving Kamei questioning what’s real and what’s in his grief-warped mind. Her ungraspable essence was inspired by the folkloric Kijimuna, an Okinawan forest sprite, which appears in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment in the film’s final scene. “It’s [also] kind of how I felt when I was younger, trying to communicate with girls,” admits Tera. “I couldn’t understand these relationships.”

With the film’s colonial themes, it’s difficult not to see overlap with the current situation in Palestine. As a citizen of Canada (first colonised by France) living in Japan for a decade, Tera says the geopolitical tensions were his way in: “It was the third script I had written, and I couldn’t find a story that actually resonated with me in Japan. And I didn’t think I would actually find one until I went to Okinawa. Even if from the get-go you might feel like these characters are completely different from what I know, they’re actually exactly what I feel like I know in spiritual and cultural ways.”

“I remember during the edit when we were seeing the news every day,” adds Harris, who was reading Daniel Immerwahr’s book How to Hide an Empire at the time. “We were all feeling it.” He comes back to the scene at the start of the film, when Kamei hears the plane flying overhead, but sees nothing when he looks up at the sky. “The thing that’s really wild about America is the ways in which we have embedded imperialism into this sense of protection. This sense of allying ourselves with the good guys is actually so insidious, because it’s all around you and you can’t see it.”