The Sun Rises On Us All
Drama • 2025 • 2h 13m
Ri Gua Zhong Tian
This movie was screened on 82. Mostra Internazionale d’Arte Cinematografica 2025
A man takes the blame for a murder committed by the woman he loves and serves the sentence. Upon leaving prison, sick, he returns to her
"It is in impossibility that love becomes absolute."
— Marguerite Duras
It is not simply a tragic melodrama: it is a hand-to-hand struggle with the weight of existence, with the guilt that corrodes, with love that disguises itself as sacrifice and turns into condemnation. Cai Shangjun constructs a film that suffocates the viewer and pins them to the paradox of a redemption that is always denied.
The heart of the story revolves around a man who, for the love of a woman, takes responsibility for a crime she committed. He goes to prison, sacrifices his life, and even his own identity. When he is released, marked by stomach cancer and a fragility etched into his bones, he finds the woman he tried to protect, and their tentative return to living together reopens a wound that has never healed. He continues to love her, with a passion that carries the weight of condemnation, but he cannot forgive. She cares for him, torn between gratitude and guilt, unable to free herself from the responsibility of the silence that condemned him.
Meanwhile, the woman had sought an escape in a new relationship with a married man who promises her an impossible future. She becomes pregnant, but the promise proves illusory: his daughter harasses him with threatening messages, and when she catches him with another woman, she tries to slit her wrists, jeopardizing the continuation of their relationship. Motherhood, which could have represented redemption, is brutally shattered: in a public restroom, she loses the baby, leaving on the floor not only blood but also the last glimmer of illusion.
Cai Shangjun orchestrates this precipice with ferocious rigor, avoiding any consolatory opening. The final embrace between the two protagonists, far from being liberating, is laden with the weight of an impossible love, marked by mutual guilt and a promise of redemption that cannot be fulfilled. The reference to a classic melodrama, almost in the style of Doctor Zhivago, does not evoke nostalgia or romantic emotion here, but an oppressive sense of condemnation: love as a chain, sacrifice as failure, life as a slow agony.
Even the title — The Sun Rises on Us All — seems to mock the characters and the audience, evoking a dawn that blinds rather than illuminates, a rebirth that remains inaccessible. It is a film that grants no catharsis: every gesture of love becomes pain, every act of hope is already marked by ruin. A cruel and tragic work, transforming melodrama into an unflinching X-ray of the human condition.
"The real torment is not suffering, but no longer being able to redeem oneself."
— Emil Cioran
This movie was in the official competition of 82nd Venice International Film Festival 2025
