Heart of Light – eleven songs for Fiji

After decades abroad, Iona (Tilda Swinton) returns to her childhood home on Fiji, sensing that there she might find the answers to many questions she has about civilisation and its discontent. A speculative autobiography realised as an enchanting hybrid of ethnographic study and essayistic fiction. A monumental work of pure cinema!

Born in Jamaica and raised partly on Fiji, yet all through the last decades based in Berlin, Cythia Beatt headed back to the South Sea archipelago she once called home for Heart of Light – eleven songs for Fiji. In its own way, her latest and arguably greatest film returns to a form of cinema Beatt first experimented with in her feature-length debut, Description of an Island (1979; co-dir Rudolf Thome), which is as much an ethnographic study of a Vanuatuan island and its inhabitants as it is an essayistic fiction about documentary filmmaking, featuring Beatt in the main role.

This time, it’s Beatt’s by-now alter ego Tilda Swinton as Iona who keeps all the different strands and levels of the film’s story of homecoming, loss and life lessons together, often shot at places remembered and too often found changed from what once they were. Heart of Light – eleven songs for Fiji finds its very own Matisseian bearing and balance in the shape of an epic cine-poem, where remedies for the world’s ills might be found at its edge.

– Olaf Möller

Trailer

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