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Starlight
A FILM BY STEFAN KUBICKI
Starlight is a documentary feature about the Sun told through the prism of solar geoengineering (also known as solar radiation management). Through a multifaceted approach that blends science, history, and culture, the film will defamiliarize the most familiar presence in our world and make us see it entirely anew.
Part 1: Monster
The sun has been chanting for billions of years. Convection currents on the solar surface produce pressure waves that travel to the inner corona and back to the surface, causing the surface to broil and vibrate.
A capricious, radiation-spewing monstrosity full of inherent violence, destructiveness, in a state of constant flux. And we live inside of its atmosphere.
Scene: Sunshine (2007)
The Sun is our protagonist and the film itself a kind of mirror, reflecting the light of our star to illuminate subjects untouched by it directly. It’s a film steeped in science from start to finish, but this is not a traditional science doc. The goal is not simply education but total immersion of the audience in the Sun’s power, to bathe the viewer in its light. Since we are star stuff, to be immersed in the glow of our own star is to be at home.
The National Ignition Fusion Facility, Livermore, CA
Part 2: Mother
“No one who lives in the sunlight makes a failure of his life.”
—Albert Camus
The warm, gentle, and profoundly reliable presence that breathes life into our world and around which we have evolved, grown, and built human civilization.
Scene: Tree of Life (2011)
I have to tell you,
there are times when
the sun strikes me
like a gong,
and I remember everything,
even your ears.
—Dorothea Grossman
Part 3: God
The Sun is God.
—J. M. W. Turner (on his deathbed)
We are the children of the Sun: a meditation on the lifecycle of our star, including its eventual death; the relationship between the Sun and Time; and the Sun as a nearly universal object of reverence and worship throughout history.
The sun is the bestower of light and life to the totality of the cosmos; with his unblinking, all-seeing eye, he is the stern guarantor of justice; with the almost universal connection of light with enlightenment or illumination, the sun is the source of wisdom.
The Sun, 1909 by Edvard Munch
Scene: The Impossible Voyage (1904)
