BLACK SUN

DC Premiere

In 1978, Hugues de Montalembert was a successful thirty-six-year-old artist living in Manhattan. Returning home one evening, he encountered two men robbing his apartment. In the vicious struggle that ensued, he was badly beaten and had paint thinner thrown into his eyes. Rushed to the hospital, de Montalembert learned that the chemicals had burned his eyes, rendering him permanently blind. BLACK SUN, the luminous debut film from composer Gary Tarn, is the inspiring story of how de Montalembert slowly rebuilt his world piece by piece and refused to allow this tragedy to destroy his spirit or hinder his lust for life.

In a crystalline voice over, de Montalembert recounts the events of that terrible day. As his tale unfolds, a cascade of images-of cities, skylines, faces and exotic landscapes-begins to blur and fade into a kaleidoscope of shadow and light that suggests the world of the blind. His recovery begins in earnest when he realizes that physical sight is only one element of what it is to see. After only a year of extensive rehabilitation, de Montalembert had traveled on his own to South East Asia where he wrote a book about his philosophical and physical resurrection. Crowned by Tarn's beautiful, resonant score, BLACK SUN is ultimately an emotional, uplifting celebration of being alive in the phenomenal world.

-Josh Speiser

DIRECTOR BIO
Gary Tarn is a self-taught musician and filmmaker, born in London, England. He started to play and write music at age seven, was performing in a punk band by fourteen, and by his twenties was an accomplished producer and multi-instrumentalist. He became captivated by the music of Indonesia, Africa and India, as well as European orchestral composers. A passion for film led to a career as a composer for film and television, and it was a natural progression to start to shoot images of his own. In 1999, he met the blind author Hugues de Montalembert, who agreed to collaborate on a film project. The result, BLACK SUN, is Tarn's first feature-length film.

Print Source:
Julie Goldman
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6/15 at 3:00 PM

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