The Colour of the Sun: Okinawa, empire and teenage masculinity

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THE Venice Film Festival is a place of discoveries, of new talent, new ideas and new ways of making movies. Among this year’s debuts, one film deserves special attention: Xavier Tera’s The Colour of the Sun.

Set in Okinawa, Japan, during the quiet, heavy heat of the summer break, the story follows Kamei, a quiet high school senior grieving the recent loss of his father. He spends his days helping to rebuild a community centre, stuck in that limbo between school and an uncertain future that so many working-class teenagers know too well.

When Kamei meets Colin, a confident American teenager raised on the local US military base, his life changes, and so do the lives of his friends. It is a cross-cultural teenage friendship, but also a confrontation. Against the constant throb of military helicopters overhead, and subtle, everyday cultural frictions, the film opens up urgent questions about colonisation and cultural identity.

It is astonishingly beautiful. Every frame is composed like a photograph, with a claustrophobic beauty that forces the audience to really look.

There are many layers of meaning. The locals are stuck in a limbo of precarious work and limited horizons. The US base is ever-present, a simple, brutal symbol of imperialism and of a culture of toxic masculinity that dominates the land.

It is written and directed by 31-year-old Xavier Tera. He was was born in Montreal with French-Canadian roots, and a background in photography.

“The title, The Colour of the Sun,” says Tera, “plays with the notion of perception and how, depending on our background, education, and what is happening around us, we can always feel that something is one way or another. That question of perception runs through everything. How you see the sun, how you see another person, depends on where you stand.”

For Tera, images are everything. This means not only the colour in the film but also the framing, the way every shot is fixed and framed in a very precise way to tell the story, and how the characters are communicating or not communicating. That precision gives the film its “frozen” quality. Okinawa feels like a world where people cannot move. Kamei doesn’t have a job and doesn’t have a future imagined. Colin doesn’t want the future his parents have. Both are searching.

Orizzonti often champions political cinema over industry gloss. As a film-maker working between North America and Asia, Tera sees Venice as vital for that reason.

“The whole backdrop of the story is based on the power of the US, this imperialistic power around the world. And that’s why it makes this story so universal. There’s American bases in Italy still. There’s American bases in Korea. And there’s political power putting their hands in governments around the world. The UK has done the same thing in the past and still doing it. All these colonial powers still affect small communities and change their culture in different ways.”

For Tera this film is deeply personal. As a French Canadian, he grew up questioning Quebec’s own colonial history. 

“The French colony from France,” he says, “took the land from First Nations. Growing up, I always questioned Quebec wanting to become its own country without including the First Nation.”

The film stems from six years of preparation. Tera immersed himself in Okinawa to understand the region’s complex colonial past from the ground. 

“I started working on the script about six years ago and lived in Okinawa for a few months, meeting with locals, asking questions, and trying to understand their history. Okinawa was first colonised by the Japanese. So, the Ryukyu, the indigenous people, had their own culture and their own language.”

The film is about the afterlife of colonialism: “The main character is trying to figure out who he is in a situation where there’s this third culture, that of the US military, happening.” 

Despite their cultural and language differences, the two teenagers become friends. 

“Instead of being against each other, they are trying to find a way that humans can communicate and be together, rather than fight.”

Tera documented the local youth on camera, publishing a photo book on Okinawan teenagers. This lived experience provided the foundation for the movie setting, a small beach community marked by generational tension and young people searching for a connection beyond their borders.

At the heart of this community lies an exploration of masculinity and fatherhood. 

“Fatherhood is such a big part of how to become a man, whatever that means,” says Tera. “And culturally, in the situation of the US versus Japan or Okinawa there are very different ideas of what masculinity should be.”

This tension comes to a head in a powerful, symbolic scene near the military base, a physical border that serves as a metaphor for imperialism and toxic masculinity. Tera fully embraces that interpretation: “They enter this place, and the US kid is pushing the other into something that he’s not used to. I wanted to see it in a way where the young American is almost representing what the US have done to the local culture. He’s not pushing him to prove that he’s stronger, but rather saying: ‘Well, this is what we do. Why are you not doing it’?”

Unlike many film-makers at festivals, Tera is openly political. “I’ve been very extremely vocal about occupied Palestine. I hate it when directors don’t want to talk about politics. If you don’t talk about politics, it’s more political than me talking about politics. I’m just being me, a citizen.”

He points out he wrote the film six years ago, but it feels even more timely now, with talk of borders between Canada and the US, and the lingering presence of a declining US imperial power still in evidence around the world. 

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