Skip to content
Himal Southasian
Sign in Sign up

‘100 Sunset’ and the emotional consequences of the Tibetan diaspora’s migration to the West

Set in Toronto’s Tibetan community, Kunsang Kyirong’s ‘100 Sunset’ captures raw realities of diasporic life in sharp contrast to the false glamour migrants project to audiences back home

By Tsering Shakya
‘100 Sunset’ and the emotional consequences of the Tibetan diaspora’s migration to the West
A still from ‘100 Sunset’, featuring Tenzin Kunsel as Kunsel and Sonam Choekyi as Passang. Director Kunsang Kyirong observes her characters with quiet intimacy, using ambiguity to reflect the precarious emotional and social realities of Tibetan diasporic life in Canada. Photo: Migmar Pictures Inc.
Published:
Share to X Share to Bluesky Share to Facebook Share to LinkedIn Share by email

THE BORDER REGION between Nepal and Tibet was once dotted with small Tibetan refugee settlements that housed hundreds of families. Supported by foreign aid, these camps aimed to reconstruct a sense of home for their inhabitants following their displacement from Chinese-occupied Tibet – including in the aftermath of the 1959 Tibetan revolt that forced thousands to flee. Today, most of these settlements stand vacant. While some former residents have returned to Tibet, the majority have migrated to Western countries. Only faint traces of the settlements’ past remain, such as rusting signboards bearing the names of Swiss and US aid organisations. Similar to depopulated villages in Japan and Italy, where economic decline, plunging birth rates and urban migration have hollowed out communities, these places reveal the long afterlife of exile and abandonment. 

 This transformation in the settlement patterns of Tibetan refugees is central to understanding the context of 100 Sunset. Although the film – written and directed by Kunsang Kyirong and released in 2025 – does not directly address the depopulation of Tibetan refugee settlements in India and Nepal, nor specify the origins of its protagonists, it suggests that the Toronto-based community it depicts is made up of individuals who migrated from Nepal to establish new lives abroad. Kyirong, who was herself born in a Tibetan refugee settlement in Nepal and migrated to Canada, has spoken about growing up between multiple worlds and wanting to depict the textures of everyday Tibetan diasporic life, which are rarely seen on-screen. 

Since the 1990s, Canada has become home to one of the largest Tibetan communities outside Southasia. Toronto’s Parkdale neighbourhood has emerged as a major centre of settlement following successive waves of arrivals from Nepal and India. Earlier generations of refugees, who fled Tibet after 1959, often imagined settlements in Nepal and India as temporary places of community and cultural preservation before eventual return to their homeland. But younger Tibetans raised in these communities came to understand the futility of that dream, and for them it was migration to the West that increasingly came to represent the possibility of permanence.