Sun Rave (Roy Samaha, 2019) (Patreon)

Roy Samaha's Sun Rave is a complex, knotty little film that, like the espionage agents described in it, does not give up its secrets easily. By bringing a number of unlikely ideas into orbit around each other, the film leads the viewer not to conclusions but to hints and suspicions, to concepts just out of reach. Because it leaves some of its most impressive maneuvers suspended, Sun Rave lingers in the mind.

Ostensibly about the impact of solar activity and magnetism on human activity back on earth, the film is in part about the use of short wave radio as a tool for spies during the Cold War (as exemplified by the most famous of the "numbers stations," The Lincolnshire Poacher), and Samaha's own personal history with some next-door neighbors who, for whatever reason, listened to it religiously before vanishing in 1988. Sun Rave discusses political events from the point off view not of human agency but of unconscious build-ups of solar energy, a force of interplanetary agitation that is governing our affairs without our awareness.

In a way, Samaha's premise is silly, a sci-fi goof on world history a la Craig Baldwin. However, there is a melancholia coursing through Sun Rave that only really hits you after the fact. Samaha's film is actually trying to answer a very real question. Why did the revolutions that ended the Cold War succeed, and the Arab Spring revolts fail? It can't simply be that one group of insurgents were more dedicated or more competent than the other, so Samaha is looking for a scientific answer. But of course, we know that this is pure irony. The solution doesn't lie in the Van Allen belt. One group was aided by the West, the other abandoned. Isn't Sun Rave's proposition more satisfying? If you want a less tragic explanation, there's always the sun.