‘Sunburn’ Director on Warm, Hangout Drama: “I Really Wanted to Make a Film Like That for the ’Hood”

Sunburn director Serville Poblete resists stereotypes with his Toronto-set ‘hood film with no scenes of gang violence or police brutality.

The Filipino-Canadian filmmaker’s coming-of-age hangout drama, set in St. James Town, a downtown housing complex in Canada’s biggest city, instead features young people forced off their cell phone screens by a citywide power blackout and joking and teasing one another as they roam about their neighborhood to escape the summer heat.

“I really wanted to make a film like that for the ‘hood, because a lot of films about the ‘hood are usually about trauma and violence and drugs, which I think are important. But I wanted to reframe what that means,” Poblete tells The Hollywood Reporter ahead of Sunburn having a world premiere at the Toronto Film Festival.

Poblete instead sought to summon memories of summer experiences for young people everywhere, before technology had them staying indoors. “I wanted to explore that relationship between people in a fun and nostalgic way, summertime, being outside, being hot, being frustrated, being in love,” Poblete adds.

As his three pairs of young characters played by Filipino, Jamaican, Guyanese and Black actors try to stay cool on summer’s hottest day, they also argue over plans to leave the Toronto high-rise community they grew up in together and explore a world outside on their own.

“When you’re a kid, you grow up together with your friends and you all think you want the same things in life,” Poblete says, adding that then young adulthood sees some people aiming at a different life elsewhere. “But I wanted to be careful not to make tension for tension’s sake and give them obstacles. I wanted to make (the movie) entertaining for entertainment sake.”

Poblete was inspired by Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird, the acclaimed coming-of-age tale that captured a complicated mother-daughter relationship with tender compassion. “My work has recently been leaning towards that kind of warmth and that light, because life is interesting and complex and so many things happen within a world where something bad doesn’t need to happen to be interesting,” he insists.

That includes the power outage shutting down cell phone networks and Sunburn deliberately not being preachy about the often-talked about mental health risks for young people from excessive technology use. “Your memories and moments with loved ones only last for so long and I hope that kind of message comes across when people watch this film, as opposed to being on the nose about kids being on their phones,” Pobelete says.