Heart of Light

Premiere: Wednesday, September 30th, Filmtheater Friedrichshain
Tickets

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

“Must we necessarily define or position ourselves in terms of the dominant insider-outsider dichotomy that pervades and occasionally overshadows present debates about Pacific history? Are there more creative and productive ways of understanding Pacific history and our location in it? …

… no single narrative today can fit all sizes, all contexts, or perspectives. History-telling must extend beyond professional historians and academics because it belongs to a much wider audience. As Borofsky advocates, it is something that we should all participate in, to personally place ourselves in the continuum of time. Besides, as he continues, ‘what we call history – the study of times past with what remains of these times in the present – gains greater credibility, gains greater objectivity, through challenges and counterchallenges.’”

Remembrance of Pacific Pasts: An Invitation to Remake History (review)

Gina Balawanilotu, Anurag Subramani, Robert Nicole

Heart of Light – eleven songs for Fiji is such a challenge to the gatekeepers of the past, its truths and stories.

Cynthia Beatt

Matisse felt that the human side of painting is the result of a mysterious, expressive quality which, if the painter himself is possessed of a good sensibility, comes through in the final painting. Thus it need not be overtly stated in the subject matter; the painter should instead construct his painting according to what he perceives, and the force of this expression will be evident as a by-product of the painter‘s own depth of humanity; not as something apart from or only presented by form, but rather as feeling which is embodied into the very fibre of form itself.
    
MATISSE ON ART by Jack D. Flam

Premiere Rotterdam International Film Festival 2026