So rare is contemporary parlance’s penchant for the optimistic, and so sparse are its vocabularies for the beatific, that Cynthia Beatt’s monumental Heart of Light – eleven songs for Fiji might strike one as unnecessarily maudlin. The film’s title comes apropos of Joseph Conrad, whose chronicles of darkest Africa reverberated with the specter of colonial despair; more immediately, however, does it draw its opening quotation from T.S. Eliot (“Looking into the heart of light, the silence”), inverting Conrad’s grandiosity only to emplace its own. Where “The Waste Land” might speak of the central essence of light, Heart of Light renders a curiously parallel interpretation, of a center — or way of being — constituted by light and coalescing around the beauty of observation. Segmented into eleven rather arbitrary vignettes, or “stanzas,” Beatt’s gentle agglomeration of the southern Pacific hemisphere is notable for its two leads: the archipelago and country of Fiji, alongside the actress Tilda Swinton, who plays a lightly fictionalized version of the director returning to a land she once called home.
Consciousness and representation of Oceania, outside of Australia and New Zealand, have traditionally been consigned to either pop infotainment (e.g., 2014’s documentary Next Goal Wins and Taika Waititi’s flippant fictionalized remake) or an idyllic, homogeneous backdrop for the critiques of colonialism (such as Albert Serra’s ravishing Pacifiction). By virtue of their distance and relative disengagement from the travails of the globalized world, Oceania’s shimmering waters and verdant isles lend a pristine and untouched quality to the narratives both realized or imagined within their dominion. In Heart of Light, this quality is largely undisturbed, at least visually speaking, with Jenny Lou Ziegel’s lush and wide compositions of the Fijian landscape fluently stitched together under Beatt and Till Beckmann’s editorial hands. But the film itself is loose and sprawling; a travelogue hybrid of narrative and narration untroubled by their interplay. As Beatt parses out the story of Iona (Swinton), a Scottish woman who spent her childhood in Fiji (where her parents were expats of some kind) before emigrating to Scotland, she surveys the country’s various locales, interweaving the lives of background characters amid a broader recognition of their histories and customs.
Swinton herself remains mostly unseen, appearing only in the last two segments as a sincere if also tentative presence seeking to reconcile her tenuous nostalgia for Fiji with the outsider position she undoubtedly occupies. By her account, she straddles two worlds, neither of which quite inhere, and the film appears almost exculpatory of the colonialist gaze naturally assumed by anyone with her character’s baggage. If Heart of Light succeeds in pushing away this sentiment, however, it is chiefly due to Beatt’s informed engagements with Fiji’s cultural and political realities, which carefully emerge over the course of its expansive runtime. Magellan’s Mar Pacifico, which antedated the effects of Western imagination but not those indigenous to the region, came to bear on shifts in religious and collective identity; later on, with the British, a demographic shift by way of Indian immigrants permanently altered the dynamics of Fiji’s ethnic and economic structures. Beatt, whose first feature (1979’s Description of an Island, co-directed with Rudolf Thome) trained its ethnographic lens onto the neighboring archipelago of Vanuatu, attempts a humbler, more graceful paean here. Over a geography of islands steeped in solitude but intimately connected, the ties of kinship stretch and persist. Against Eliot’s succeeding line of a bleak and empty sea, their very existence, sensitively rendered by Beatt’s cinematic tone-poem, offers no little reprieve.
Published as part of IFFR 2026 — Dispatch 4.
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