Light of the Setting Sun director Vicky Du as a child and her mom in Taipei, Taiwan. Courtesy of the filmmakers
Documentary is happy to debut the trailer for Vicky Du’s first feature, Light of the Setting Sun (2024). The film premiered last year at Full Frame and will open theatrically next month at DCTV. Light of the Setting Sun inquires into the director’s family history through family archives, Du’s voiceover, and a culminating mother-daughter trip to Taiwan to unlock what can’t be said. Pic is produced by Danielle Varga (The Hottest August).
Citing inspiration from Taiwanese auteur Edward Yang, Du explains the incredibly personal beginnings of her film: “Eight years ago, my brother shared that he had a mental breakdown, and almost more shockingly, my parents were unable to talk about it. This led to a series of family therapy sessions with my immediate family. In these sessions, we were asked to do a family tree exercise. The family tree began with my grandparents who fled China during the Communist Revolution of 1949 and ended with my cousins’ children in the United States and Canada. The therapist asked us to mark an X over every family member who experienced mental illness, domestic violence, drug abuse, or trouble with the law. Together, we marked an X over nearly every person, across four generations, from the East to the West. My brother’s mental breakdown, and our violent childhood, gained new context: we had inherited something from our family that was previously unnameable.
“The weight of this family tree—the feeling that the trauma was an inescapable fate for me, my brother, and potentially our future children—compelled me to travel to Taiwan to meet and film with different branches of the family to understand how the effects of war and genocide continue to reverberate throughout all of us. Despite having met most of these family members only once or twice prior to filming, we all share the same, devastating family bond.”