Immigration Lead Character of The Sun is Also a Star

I was in love and looking to expand my career by moving from New York City to Los Angeles.  The relationship I was involved in at the time was strained and my decision to make this move didn’t help matters much. As raindrops covered the windshield of my taxi like my tears,  I’ll never forget watching him standing on my old block as I moved further and further away from what I thought was the love of my life.

To believe in love is to believe in fate.  Meet Natasha and Daniel.  Daniel is Korean, a hopeless romantic and Natasha is on the verge of being deported to Jamaica..  Natasha (Yara Shahidi) doesn’t believe in love because there is not scientific proof to back it up.  Plus, her focus is elsewhere.  That’s when fate brings her to Daniel (Charlie Melton) who challenges Natasha.  He tells her that he can make her fall in love with him in one day. After all, we don’t have forever, sometimes all we have is a single day.

Based on the hit novel by Nicola Yoon, The Sun is Also a Star is an intersection between love, race and culture that permeates America. Taking place in New York City, a place filled with humanity, dreams, loss and love, Daniel and Natasha learn rapidly that the choice we make and the path we choose to inhabit can change your life in ways never expected.

When we meet Natasha she I traveling to immigration as a last ditch effort to keep her family from being deported and told that removal is final and no longer under the court jurisdiction.  A ray of hope comes in the form of a pro-bono immigration lawyer (John Leguizamo), but the celebration is short-lived.  On the film side, Daniel’s Korean immigrant parents desperately want him to attend college in order to have a better life.

Seen from Natasha’s point of view through narration and flashbacks we fall in love with this couple who are ridiculously gorgeous between Yara Shahidi and Charles Melton with a chemistry that lights the screen on fire!

Nicola Yoon insists this is NOT an autobiographical story but one strongly based on elements of her life with her husband David.  The two time New York Times best-selling author writes her novels by hand (very much like her Idol the late Maya Angelou) and while Yara was everyone’s first choice for Natasha, it was revealed Charles Melton was chosen from YouTube after scores of people suggested him for the role of Daniel.  Yoon also mentioned the intentional desire to cast of a multi-ethnic cast stating, “…you can’t be what you can’t see.”

I agree.  Most of these stories often times revolve around young white couple with maybe a person of color as the wing man or some ancillary secondary character.  It’s nice to know that this generation of kids will now grow up in a world where they have seen a Black man as President, women running and winning public offices and characters in a love story that reflect the melting pot world we live in.  Especially in New York, where you often times see hardly any people of color in films shot in the city…a drastic difference from the NYC I experience on a daily basis.

Produced by Warner Brothers, The Sun is Also a Star is a beautifully executed story in opposites attract with a modern day Cinderella story except deportation is the glass slipper.