Jacqueline Zünd’s ‘Don’t Let the Sun’ Captures Brutal Climate Change Heat

Documentary filmmaker Jacqueline Zünd’s first fiction feature “Don’t Let the Sun”– set to premiere at Switzerland’s Locarno Film Festival – portrays a world of stifling heat where human contact is hard to establish. Speaking to Variety, the Swiss director talked about how the idea had come to her while working in Japan on her documentary “Almost There” in 2016: “The whole idea started with a discovery I made in Japan of an agency where you can rent any social relation, like somebody waving at the station when you go to the holidays, or somebody sitting close to you and saying nothing, or maybe a lost daughter or just a friend for a birthday party. And the concept of this agency made me think about human relations and how they may change.” 

This idea connected to another project – provisionally called “Heat” – about life changing due to rising global temperatures. “I wanted to focus on how human relations change with the influence of exterior conditions like, for example, our climate crisis. So what happens, for example, when it’s so hot, when it’s unbearable to be in your own skin, how can you get close to somebody else?” 

In “Don’t Let the Sun,” sold by Sideral Cinema as the winner of its inaugural Goes to Cannes Award, Levan Gelbakhiani plays Jonah, a young man who works for an agency pretending to be other people. He takes on a job of playing the father of a young girl, Nika (Maria Pia Pepe). “We did a lot of exercises before filming with the heat, but then when we filmed in Milan in August it was 40 degrees. It was so hot, you didn’t have to pretend anymore. It was really tough, but it felt right. It’s almost a silent film, because everything is too much, so you don’t even talk anymore. Even in the editing, we cut a lot of dialogue because you get a reduction of of everything.”

Shooting in Milan and Genoa in Italy with additional footage of São Paulo by Sebastian Metz standing in for the sun-bleached exteriors, the shoot also involved long nights as the characters could only come out once the sun had gone down. “It’s not so far from the reality we’re living in now. There are countries where people start to work at night because it’s too hot during the day, like construction workers in the Emirates, for example. It’s not like a future thing for me. It’s just like a step to the side and a glimpse into a possibility which is very close.” 

Zurich born, Zünd studied at the London International Film School before debuting with her documentary about insomnia “Goodnight Nobody” in 2010, which picked up a number of awards including Best Newcomer Film at Nyon’s Visions du Réel. As her first fiction film, “Don’t Let the Sun” overlapped with a parallel documentary. “I was filming and researching a documentary called “Heat” about how heat influences people. It will be finished by the beginning of next year: the first quarter of 2026. One project influences the other one and inspired the other one. I could take some stuff from the documentary world to write in the fiction world, like, for example, the cooling room, where, where these guys are going, just to sit and to cool down, which I found in New York.” 

Shooting in São Paulo was nixed because of budgetary considerations but suitable locations of expressive brutalist architecture were found in Milan and Genoa. “When making documentaries, I’m always looking for very strong locations which reflect the inner states of the people,” Zünd says. “The way I do my documentaries is not so far away from fiction. The subjects are real people but I condense their life in a way. So it’s not so far away from like a fiction. Besides that, they are their lives and their stories, and they’re playing themselves, and so what was liberating for me was to work for the first time with actors. You don’t have to have this responsibility for like these human beings who are playing themselves and their stories. That was very liberating for me. But it’s close. The two things creatively brush against each other.” 

“Don’t Let the Sun” is produced by Louis Mataré at Switzerland Lomotion, in co-production with Davide Pagano at Italy’s Casa Delle Visioni with backing from Swiss public broadcaster SRF Schweizer Radio und Fernsehen.