Filmmaker Carol Polakoff’s Feature Film SPEAK SUNLIGHT: Leaving a Part of One’s Self in Another While Seeking Forgiveness of Past Wrongs

Ladies and gentlemen, Carol Polakoff’s SPEAK SULIGHT is a beautiful story that you must see. After 30 years in exile, a couple return to their homeland. Manolo and Maruja work as butler and cook/nanny at the Jolis diplomatic residence in Paris. 

Alanito,15, considers the kitchen his spiritual home, where he can laugh, misbehave, get a shot of port or a puff of a cigarette from Maruja. She adores and spoils him while his parents entertain scores of guests, paying him little attention. 

Maruja receives life-altering news that leads to a return to Spain after 30 years. In the blink of an eye, they are on a train to Pamplona. It’s the time of De Gaulle, Franco, and the Beatles. Secrets are uncovered, courage summoned, and at the end of the summer everyone is changed.

SPEAK SUNLIGHT is type of film that cinema needs right now. Stories of family, with past stories to uncover that have shaped the characters present and that will shape their future.

Everything about this film is beautiful. The story, the acting, the dialogue and even the cinematography and coloring as it all works together in a synergistic dance of real life, love and loss. Again, it is a must see picture.

Writer/director Carol Polakoff. After working as a photojournalist in Jerusalem, Carol pursued graduate studies at the London International Film School.

Her multi-award-winning documentary CUBA: In the Shadow of Doubt won the Golden Hugo at the Chicago Film Festival. Her television work has been nominated for numerous Emmys and has received two Director's Guild Awards.

Her documentary, In Our Lifetime, was honored by the Israeli Government and the Palestinian Authority and she was invited to act as a U.N. observer in the first Palestinian Elections in 1996. She produced the Israeli feature The Death of My Father and Cinema, Too, which was in Official Competition at Cannes in 2020. Carol was also a producer on the Academy Award-nominated Tell it like a Woman.

Her newest feature film, the wonderful SPEAK SUNLIGHT, set majorly Pamplona in 1965, follows the life of American writer Alan Jolis as he awakes to a vivid sensual world and grows up emotionally.

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