A world of escalating temperatures, where evenings approach a sweltering 50 degrees Celsius, human connections are increasingly fragile, and people resort to rental agencies to hire strangers to feign friendship, marriage, or family bonds. This is the reality depicted in Jacqueline Zünd’s ‘Don’t Let the Sun,’ an Italian-Swiss co-production presented at the Locarno Film Festival, where it earned Georgian actor Levan Gelbakhiani the award for Best Performance in the Filmmakers of the Present category. The director states this is not a dystopian fantasy but a concrete threat, asserting that everything shown in the film “is already being experienced somewhere on Earth.”
The film follows Jonah (Gelbakhiani), a 28-year-old man working for an agency that provides human relationships on demand. Through his job, he ends up acting as a father figure to Nika (Maria Pia Pepe)—a child whose mother (Agnese Claisse) chose to have her alone—and in the process, he discovers a new part of himself. Zünd, who co-wrote the screenplay with Arne Kohlweyer, explained the idea originated while she was in Japan for another project. “There, I discovered a company that actually allows you to rent any kind of ‘social contact,'” she recounted. “That got me thinking about our human relationships, how they are changing and how they are influenced by the external world.” This led her to explore themes of alienation and loneliness within the broader, equally urgent context of global warming.
In the film, characters live at night to escape the unbearable morning heat. The visual landscape is dominated by brutalist architecture, a conscious directorial choice. “I was trying to use the buildings to represent human fragility,” Zünd added. The initial plan was to shoot in the brutalist city of São Paulo, Brazil, but complications with co-production and the political climate made it unfeasible. Instead, the production filmed only aerial shots in Brazil, using special effects to remove people from the streets. The primary filming locations were in Milan and Genoa, specifically at the Monte Amiata housing complex and the residential buildings nicknamed ‘The Washing Machines.’