Hong Kong, summer 2026. In the worst heat in memory, Titì, a homeless former schoolteacher, dies on a metro station floor, drawing together two lives never meant to meet. Rico, a former foreign correspondent who covered China’s rise, has gambled away his career, his wife and his son. Homeless, he sets out to walk east across a city that no longer sees him, to an old lighthouse at the far end of the island, past old friends and strangers on its edges.

A few streets away, Kai, thirteen, son of a mainland mother working two jobs, is bullied at school and alone at home. Kept from his father’s deathbed, he recognises in Rico’s cough the end he was never allowed to witness and, against everything life has taught him, follows him.

Based on Jean-Claude Izzo’s novel Le soleil des mourants, A Sun for the Dying is an intimate drama about the people a prosperous city stops seeing, in a Hong Kong torn between a fading identity and the growing pull of China, where the last act of resistance is staying beside someone until the end.