Gibraltar production ‘The Last Sun’ imagines Rock as last place touched by sunlight
The Last Sun, a new Gibraltar-made sci‑fi thriller, is set to shine a spotlight on the Rock’s landscape with a story that combines the themes of sunlight, control, and some of the deep divisions experienced during the pandemic years.
Speaking to the Chronicle, Canadian filmmaker and actress Lynn Hardy said her academic interests fed directly into the film’s central concept.
“I studied quantum biology, so I'm very passionate about the sun and our environment and how healthy nature is,” she said.
“The idea of the film was that big corporations around the world decided to block out the sun all over the world, because it's harmful to humans. We don't need the sun. They block it out.”
“And the only place where the sun still shines is Gibraltar, due to this anomaly that is caused by the Rock.”
“In Gibraltar we still have the sun, but this is the only place on Earth. But even in Gibraltar, people are forced into underground colonies to keep them safe.”
Ms Hardy also stars in the movie and plays Lena, a scientist who knows the official narrative is wrong.
“I know the truth. I know the sun is not harmful, but my husband is just adamant that we're all going to die,” she said.
“And we have a daughter, Alba, and he's packing, and he wants to get into the tunnels as soon as possible so he'll be safe.”
Lena tries desperately to stop her husband from taking their daughter underground and eventually he agrees to stay for three days, only for Lena to wake up and discover he has left in the night, taking their child with him.
The tunnels are sealed, wired shut, and she is left isolated on the surface.
“This is how the film begins. So it's quite emotional,” she said.
Eight years later, alone in a lighthouse, the story jumps forward to where Lena has actually built a machine that can disperse the artificial cloud, the Blight, overhead.
The machine, however, is incomplete.
“She's trying to make it so that it will work on a global scale, but this is proving to be very difficult and her equation is missing something,” Ms Hardy said.
“She can only get this machine to work for like, 10 seconds, and then she realises that, you know, her machine is not going to work anymore.”
After years of solitude, hiding from drones that monitor the surface, Lena discovers a stranger washed up on Gibraltar’s shores. He turns out to be the missing piece in more ways than one.
“She takes this stranger into the lighthouse, and this stranger comes with the missing piece that was missing from her equation,” she said.
“I don't want to give everything away, but with the help of some psychedelics that he finds outside, he's able to go into a trance and complete her equation to get her machine to work.”
The film’s ending is deliberately open as the machine works, but then it looks like it's not working again, it's all over, and they appear to give up.
“And then we have a little bit of hope at the end of the film, but we don't really know what's going to happen. It's up to the audience's interpretation, whether it's working now or it isn't,” she said.
Beyond its science‑fiction premise, the film also reflects very real social tensions.
“My idea was that people will be able to relate to this, even if they are not into conspiracy theories or anything like that, but those who are into these things, they will get it in the first minute,” she said.
“I also wanted to highlight the division that we went through during the pandemic, and how divided people were and families got torn apart by different points of view.”
“This is really brought out in the film as well. Kind of the parallel as to what was happening during the pandemic, and I think people will really pick up on that.”
The short film, approximately 30 minutes long, grew out of Ms Hardy’s renewed love of acting and a desire to show Gibraltar’s beauty on screen.
“I live in Gibraltar, so that's why I wanted to use it as the setting,” she said, and her return to film began with a horror project shot locally last summer called Vases.
“It was my first time on screen for the past 30–35 years,” she recalled. Having landed the role of the mother of the lead actress in that movie, she was also successful in being in another movie with local cast members called Magdalena's Land.
“From there, I just kind of got the bug. And the guys who directed Vases said, ‘Lynn, why don't you just make your own film?’ And I'm like, ‘Okay,’ you know. And the ideas kind of came out of that.”
At the heart of the new film is one of Gibraltar’s most recognisable landmarks, the iconic lighthouse at Europa Point. Ms Hardy was determined to use it as a central visual and symbolic anchor for the story.
“I really wanted to highlight the beauty of Gibraltar, you know, like with the lighthouse and everything,” she said.
However, permission to film inside the lighthouse was not granted.
“We tried to get access for filming inside the lighthouse, and we did not get permission, sadly, so for the set, what we did was we rebuilt the inside of the lighthouse in my garage.”
“And we filmed everything in the garage as if we were inside the lighthouse.”
“And then the rest of the scenes we filmed on the outside of the lighthouse and in the surrounding areas.”
As it was her first project, she wanted it to be a short film believing a 90-minute movie would be “very ambitious”.
She began writing in July, working closely with her acting coach Simon Reynolds, a Canadian actor with an extensive filmography which includes working with Hollywood icons such as Keifer Sutherland and Michael Douglas, Kim Basinger and Eva Longoria.
“When I was writing the script, he said, ‘Well, let me look over your script.’ And he actually took it and took it to a whole different level. He improved it a great deal,” she said.
Local film producer Nigel Canepa was also involved in the creation of the movie and it took the trio two to three months, going back and forth, before they had the final script.
Building the lighthouse interior set in her garage took nearly two months, led by Art Director Ian Law, who previously worked on EastEnders for six years.
“We only filmed for 10 days, and it was a pretty easy‑going shoot,” said Ms Hardy.
“We were very lucky to have perfect weather the whole time.”
Post‑production and editing then ran over several months.
“A lot of the cast are Gibraltarian,” she confirmed, listing Kavi Sacha, Celine Charvetto, who plays Alba and is the daughter of the director Orlando, and Leslie Grima, a local theatre actor who plays Jerry, the lighthouse keeper.
Mr Reynolds flew in from India, where he lives in an ashram, to play Lena’s husband, Leo.
The cinematographer is the well-known Jim Crone and Martin Winterstein-Smith headed up the sound department.
Stephanie Byrne is the third assistant director, Jonathan Costa is in the art department and Kaylan Gonzalez is the assistant camera.
“We just have such a good, tight team in Gibraltar. We are so lucky,” she said.
The film is already beginning its festival journey.
“We just finished [post‑production] recently, and now we are submitting it to the film festivals. We've been accepted to three already, but we just started,” she said.
At present, the movie has been submitted to about 150 different festivals.
In addition, a Gibraltar premiere is planned, probably in May.
Ms Hardy also highlighted a growing wave of filmmaking activity on the Rock, including plans for a new heist film to shoot between May and August.
“There's so much happening in Gibraltar, as far as filming goes, which is really cool,” she said.
