We talked to Swiss director Jacqueline Zünd about her Locarno title Don’t Let the Sun [+lire aussi :
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interview : Jacqueline Zünd
fiche film], presented in Filmmakers of the Present. The feature is set in a future where the heat of the sun leads people to live their lives only during the night. The young protagonist, Jonah, works as a peculiar type of actor, delivering real-life performances to play roles in people’s lives. Zünd discussed the origin of the story and the shooting process, among other things.

Cineuropa: Why did you feel the need to shift to fiction? Why this particular story? It’s a mix of climate change and isolation, so did COVID-19 play a part?
Jacqueline Zünd: It didn’t, because I began writing before COVID. However, during the pandemic, it definitely felt uncanny, as if what I had imagined was happening in real life, albeit under different circumstances. I was amazed at how quickly the world could change. In my film, people only live at night, and during COVID, the streets were similarly empty. What struck me the most during those years was how quickly we, as human beings, adapt. Then, while I was shooting Almost There [+lire aussi :
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bande-annonce
fiche film] in Japan, I discovered an agency that allowed you to rent people – for example, someone to wait for you at the station or to behave like your long-lost daughter, or somebody for your birthday party so you can post on Instagram, because it looks better if you have a lot of people sitting at your table. In the end, I didn't have the agency idea in focus any more; it became more of a background setting because the protagonist is independent in that sense. I wanted to focus more on social relations, and how they change and get influenced by the external situation of the world.

Did you notice if this agency was doing well? What were your moral opinions on it?
I was talking to a young woman in Japan who was renting a friend, but she was 22 and sociable. I genuinely couldn’t understand why she felt the need to do that, because I thought that she didn't actually need it. She explained to me that for her, it was much more comfortable because she saw it as a deal where she didn’t have to give anything back to the person, in terms of friendship. I have never really believed that I can judge this system: if it helps people feel better, then it's not necessarily a negative or a positive thing; it's just a further possibility or a glimpse into a possibility.

This is your first fiction feature after a series of documentaries. In what way do you think your background has affected the style in which you chose to shoot the film?
I think my documentary approach is actually closer to fiction than my fiction is to documentary. However, in the end, as a filmmaker, all of your works tend to bear similarities to your other works. The shooting itself is totally different: normally, there are something like four people on set for my documentaries, and on this one, there were 40 people, more or less. But when I look at the end result, I don't see a big difference. What’s more, it was very nice working with actors. One of the reasons why I didn't really do fiction before was because I was always a little afraid of actors. For me, it’s much more natural to work with real people, but in this film, I discovered what it really means to work with actors, and I found it liberating because you don't have the same responsibility that you face when working with real stories. I loved it.

The movie has a lot of urban sequences and relies heavily on such scenery. Where did you shoot?
At first, we wanted to shoot in São Paulo because I was drawn to its futuristic style and the fact you cannot immediately tell which city it is. It matched the dystopian concept perfectly, so I thought it would be ideal. We made several attempts to secure a co-production, but the political climate at the time made it very difficult, so we started looking for other places. Since I deeply love location scouting, I kept looking and discovered some brutalist buildings in Italy that I loved. One was in Milan, and the other was a social housing complex near Genoa known as “The Washing Machine” because of its many circular shapes that resemble hundreds of such appliances. I found it fascinating. So, we shot there, and then we got our exterior shots in São Paulo.