A Portrait of director Cynthia Beatt

Of all the films to be released in 2026, Cynthia Beatt’s HEART OF LIGHT may have had the longest gestation period. “I had been wanting to do this since 1975,” says the Berlin-based British filmmaker. At the time she had – together with Rudolf Thome – completed the ‘ethnographic-feature’ STUDY OF AN ISLAND set on the island Ureparapara in Vanuatu. The Berlin-based Beatt had spent the formative years of her youth in Fiji and she felt the creative need to devote herself to this region much more extensively. In the mid-80s she completed a script version for what was finally to become HEART OF LIGHT. Tilda Swinton, with whom she had become friends shortly after her breakthrough role in Derek Jarman’s CARAVAGGIO, was to play the lead character in the film. So what took her so long? “Life”, she says with a chuckle, referring among others to the birth of her two children and an extended stay in Rome with her German sculptor husband Raimund Kummer. The graduate of the Bath Academy of Art continued her filmmaking career, realizing shorts like CYCLING THE FRAME in 1988 featuring a Scottish woman on a bicycle tour along the 160k Berlin wall and THE PARTY – NATURE MORTE (both with Swinton). At the same time, she kept working on her passion project, going back and forth between Fiji and Europe. During the rewrites she realized: “I can’t have a white woman as a central actor. The central protagonist is Fiji. At some point I said to Tilda that her part would be much smaller. And she said ‘Fine’.”

For Cynthia Beatt, this project held an obvious personal stimulus: “It was about retracing certain steps of my life and the experience of being deeply connected to and formed by a country, which was not the country of my parents.” At the same time this film was to focus on the phenom­enon of colonialism, which Cynthia Beatt has a “deep interest” in. As opposed to Jamaica, where she was born and spent her early childhood, Fiji has a strong indigenous culture. The islands became “like a microcosm of the greater world”. Therefore, the filmmaker approached her subject with a sense of “egalitarianism” and the need to adapt to the “Fijian way of doing things.” “I needed to be guided,” she says. This meant having Fijian team members. But it took as long as 2022 until her company Heartbeatt Pictures, together with Philippe Avril’s La Cinéfiliale and German broadcaster ZDF/3Sat – put the financing together (BKM/FFA). The major part of principal photography was from August until November – including one month with Tilda Swinton. In 2023 Beatt returned with her daughter Frangipani, a photographer, and the Fijian assistant cameraman, Jimmy Wilisoni, for additional footage.

Given her artistic sensibilities, it was clear from the get-go that this was not going to be a traditional narrative film. She had already formulated her credo at the time of her 60-minute film THE INVISIBLE FRAME (2011), where Tilda Swinton retraces her trajectory of CYCLING THE FRAME on both sides of the former wall. She took her inspiration from Henri Matisse: “He felt that the human side of painting is the result of a mysterious, expressive quality which (…) comes through in the final painting (…) I apply it to cinema. (…) Film is like music. In a sense, I compose my films as ‘musical scores.’”

Fortunately, she found a like-minded collaborator in Tilda Swinton: “We’re soulmates. Like me she is concerned with questions of formal innovation and different ways of telling stories. For HEART OF LIGHT I knew that I could take her to an island and she would respond to people and situations in a way that was extremely delicate and intelligent.” In line with her artistic philosophy and personal tastes, Cynthia Beatt likes to challenge her viewers – which is also why her film has a running time of 2 hours and 45 minutes. She puts her hopes on festivals and arthouse cinemas to secure an audience. One wish with regards to the presentation of HEART OF LIGHT has already come true: The film will premiere at the Rotterdam Film Festival. One of the reasons for her preference: “Olaf Möller is a curator and I admire his programming.”

With her magnum opus ready to go out into the world, Cynthia Beatt plans to return as a filmmaker to Fiji: “I’m interested in encouraging people there to develop and make their own films. There is so much potential. And I can make a film about the clouds in the Pacific Ocean. That’s a fascinating subject in itself.”

Rüdiger Sturm