The Colour of the Sun premiered at the Venice Film Festival 2026.
Xavier Tera's debut is a major Orizzonti competition highlight.
Naoto Shimajiri and West Mulholland lead a gentle, affecting coming-of-age tale set in Okinawa.
Kamei (Naoto Shimajiri) has been silently grieving. His father’s recent death hangs over his thoughts. In Xavier Tera’s The Colour of the Sun, bereavement also turns a conduit for the inevitable exploration youthfulness catapults. There’s a lot of hurt, unprocessed emotion which has him darting in circles. Neither can he really open up to his mother. The closed line of dialogue, a stunted chance to vent, makes healing an incredibly lonely journey. Premiering in Orizzonti competition at the Venice Film Festival, Tera’s gently shaped drama zeroes in on fine emotional detail, accruing power through modest, nevertheless piercing suggestion.
Set in the main island Okinawa, the film opens just before Kamei’s summer break. It’s the final year of high school. Kamei feels like everything is on the cusp of change, that it’s all about to end. He’s haunted by the memory of his father, the shattering nature of whose passing is unrolled much later. We accompany the retreating, guarded Kamei on this last summer holiday. He records little everyday moments as reservoirs of memories, holding onto the audio dispatches of his late marine biologist father’s findings. Kamei is attracted to a classmate Sayaka (Yuma Taira), but in his diffidence, he can’t quite share his feelings. He stumbles across Colin (West Mulholland), a confident, outgoing American teen raised on the bases. DP Sayombhu Mukdeeprom exquisitely brings out a glimmer of possibility in a night scene where the two run into each other and strike a conversation. For a brief while, the quiet, sublime night shuffles off the world’s heaviness as it witnesses the start of a friendship that has to reckon with the cross-cultural frisson. Friendship can be capable of being the strongest antidote to political chasms, the ruptures national boundaries enact and hone.
The island being limned by US military bases lends a prevailing sense of consternation and friction. The US controlled Okinawa from the ‘40s till the early ‘70s, when sovereignty was returned to the Japanese and re-established. Yet, a slew of US bases is persisted, a bone of contention among the locals. Coupled with this are also frequently reported sexual crimes and excesses committed scot-free by the American forces.
Kamei’s grandfather runs a community centre, mobilising local disfavour and protests against the bases, the heightened American military intrusion. Kamei tries to put himself forth in such work, but he nurses resentment against him for abandoning his father when most needed. Kamei grudges his grandfather for not reaching out to his troubled father, instead caring more for his reputation. This spellbindingly delicate drama turns instead to the connection blossoming between Kamei and Colin. One wants to leave Okinawa for distant shores, the other, supposed to be going away soon, wishes he could stay back forever. As attendant to intense teenage phases, heartache, jealousies and confusion tail relationships. There's a real throbbing churn Shimajiri and Mulholland tap in the central knotty friendship, with just the right tinge of queer curiosity.
Fundamentally, The Colour of the Sun presents a conflicted, see-sawing mapping of cultural belonging and the dissonances that thrash into play when disparate identities seek to sit together. Belonging is always a knotty negotiation, forced to operate along sharply defined narratives around original inhabitants, colonized erasure and lingering invasion. Tera flips open the other American space lodged within the island when Kamei and his friends are invited by Colin to his place. At the base’s precincts, Kamei is treated as a suspect outsider until he’s let in. Colin too lost his father. The section hints at similarities and echoes between the two boys, but Kamei is too sealed within his own woe to accept the kindness towards himself.
Paranoia rankled into abiding presence, thanks to a cruel history, ensures the splits and scars remain, even if in another form. When pushed to a corner in one’s own perception, there’s a firm stake of ownership, demanding exclusive access to cultural heritage. So, when Kamei is unable to get a foothold on his life and relationships, he dishes out the exclusionary card first, lashing at Colin to return to where he came from. Colin’s response is even more wrenching, a cutting reminder of belonging far more fluid than it’s allowed to be.
Identity becomes straitjacketed into a very specific demarcation alone. But it also complicates the act of reparations. Tera’s screenplay keeps the local unease around the US military presence constantly buzzing in the backdrop. Yet within its forbidding divides, a friendship forms, tentative, prone to stumbling but one which will chart its own course. Tera’s soft, subtly layered film is keen and attentive to the hum deep within a bunch of teenagers, pining for some sort of anchorage. It spills with these delicate, hushed passages like when Kamei confesses he can’t tell the sky and sea apart. Both look the same to him due to his colour blindness. Kamei resists his friends grasping to hold him close. He sinks into his own inner abscesses, denying himself the road to rise above loss. Kamei won’t admit it, but he’s also stricken by an envy for Colin’s self-assertiveness.
The beating soul of The Colour of the Sun, Naoto Shimajiri holds every shade of a complex, multi-tiered equation with personal identity, roots and purpose with requisite patience. This endlessly compassionate, graceful film accords due time for its subterranean life-affirming qualities to well up and envelop us all in a beautiful, profoundly touching swell. After a lot of chafing, Tera wisely circles back to the mother-son bond, trusting that final decisive freeing push to stem from none other than Kamei’s mother herself. This is a gorgeously emotional gem.
