A movie version of Rebecca Dinerstein’s 2015 novel, The Sunlit Night, will be made available through video on demand on July 17. The film was screened at the Sundance Film Festival last year, and its distributor, Quiver Distribution, recently released a new trailer. It stars Independent Spirit Award nominee Jenny Slate and Tony Award–winner Alex Sharp, and features Gillian Anderson and Zach Galifianakis in supporting roles.
In the novel, Frances, an American artist in her 20s who recently broke up with her college boyfriend, accepts a summer apprenticeship at Norway’s Viking Museum. There, an artist named Nils teaches her how to paint all-yellow murals while she takes stock of her own life. Meanwhile, 17-year-old Russian American New Yorker Yasha and his father take a trip to Norway, where the elder man dies, and the son finds himself alone in a strange land. Before too long, the two characters’ stories converge. “Dinerstein’s writing is light and lyrical, and her descriptions of the far north are intoxicating,” noted Kirkus reviewer, who also wrote that “Yasha and Frances and the cast of sitcom-ready Norwegian misfits who staff the museum are engaging and sad and quirky, if not particularly substantial.”
Judging from its trailer, the film adaptation appears to have aged up the main characters—Slate, who plays Frances, is 38, and Sharp, as Yasha, is 31—but it appears faithful to the novel in its broad strokes. Slate also co-produced the film.
The book’s author—who now uses her married name, Rebecca Dinerstein Knight—adapted her own work for the screen. She published her latest novel, Hex, this past March.
David Rapp is the senior Indie editor.
