In 1936 Adam leads the Hungarian fencing team to the Berlin Olympics. In the tense final match, Adam’s blade breaks, and as he tries to decide which fencing sword to choose as a replacement, he softly repeats the Lord’s Prayer. Adam goes on to win the match and the Gold Medal for Hungary. Before leaving Berlin, he gives his autograph to some Hitler Youth. He then returns to Budapest, where he is given a tumultuous welcome as a national hero.

It’s not long before the Hungarian fascist government, which is allied with Germany, starts to restrict the freedom of Jews. The Sors family reacts too slowly and is swept up in the Holocaust. Adam dies a grisly death at the hands of Hungarians who are tools of the Nazis, and Adam’s now adolescent son Ivan witnesses his father’s brutal murder. Adam’s wife Hannah and his brother Istvan and Istvan’s wife all perish in the Holocaust as well. However, Sors family matriarch Valerie manages to survive, as does Adam’s son Ivan, the narrator.

After World War II, the Communist Party comes to power in Hungary. Seeking revenge against the fascists for the atrocities they committed, the young adult Ivan takes a job with the state police. Comrade Ivan zealously pursues his work, and at a big Communist celebration he makes a speech where he praises Stalin. He meets policewoman Carole Kovacs, and one evening as she sits on the edge of his office desk and leans back, he begins a torrid sexual relationship with her.

Eventually Ivan is assigned to investigate a Zionist conspiracy to overthrow the Communist government. But when he reports that he can find no evidence of such a conspiracy, Ivan finds himself under investigation. This causes Carole to distance herself from him, and their relationship ends badly. Ivan becomes disillusioned with the oppressive Communist regime and resigns his police position. During the brief, unsuccessful 1956 uprising, Ivan speaks out publicly against the Communists. This leads to his arrest, and he spends three years behind bars.

Upon his release from prison, Ivan finds his grandmother Valerie in failing health. After her death, he is going through family papers when he comes upon a letter from his great-grandfather Emmanuel to his grandfather Ignatz that says, "If your life is a struggle for acceptance, you’ll always be unhappy." Ivan decides to change his name from Sors to Sonnenschein and faces the future with renewed hope.

In spite of the film’s large cast, there are no weak links in the acting. Ralph Fiennes is very good indeed as he plays the three roles of the Emperor-loving Ignatz, the fencing champion Adam, and the Communist policeman Ivan. Fiennes supplies each of these three characters with a distinct personality. And in an important supporting role, David de Keyser seems just right as the narrator’s great-grandfather Emmanuel. But the cast member who best captures her character is Rosemary Harris. Harris plays the older Valerie as a woman who remains true to her own heart, and she makes it credible that the narrator would say about his grandmother, "She was the only one in our family who had the gift of breathing freely."

The costumes and sets are outstanding in Sunshine, and the location shooting in Budapest, Vienna, and Berlin is superb. And the film contains several memorable images, including the photograph of the young Valerie in the same pose as the classical statue Spinario, the crowds of Jews in the Budapest Ghetto awaiting transportation to the concentration camps, and the newsreel-like footage of the 1956 uprising with Beethoven’s Egmont Overture playing on the soundtrack.

There’s not much drama in the first half of Sunshine, so patience is required to get to the more engaging parts of the film, but in my opinion, that patience will be richly rewarded. Also, the movie has so many characters that there’s simply not enough time to fully develop any of them. But the film is complex, its ideas are provocative, and in the end it packs an emotional wallop. I found Sunshine to be well worth seeing, and I recommend it highly.

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