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Romance

Sunrise

Year
1927
Director
F. W. Murnau
Length
75 minBFI Player Czech archive Version Version sources ↓

A near-wordless love story of overwhelming beauty.

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RomanticBeautiful Great first watch · Easy Romance
Sunrise — A boat crosses luminous dawn water between dark reeds.

Image: Monocurator · source · Original Monocurator artwork

What to expect

Sunrise tells a deeply emotional story with movement, light, superimposed images, and sets that seem to change with the characters' feelings. Its world can be realistic one moment and dreamlike the next, yet the central relationship remains easy to follow. The film shows how silent cinema could make inner conflict visible, turning a simple journey between country and city into flowing visual poetry.

How to ease in

The opening is darker than the film's reputation for romance may suggest, so allow its emotional direction to reveal itself gradually. Faces, weather, and changing landscapes carry more meaning than the intertitles. The city sequence deliberately shifts the rhythm toward bustle and play. A sympathetic musical score helps connect those changes without making them feel like separate films.

Heads-up

A quick, non-exhaustive note Centres on marital betrayal and an attempted murder, with coercion, peril, and intense emotional distress.
Momo's Note May contain spoilers Who is Momo? →
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Sunrise can make a street behave like a feeling. Traffic disappears, lights bloom, and an ordinary walk briefly belongs to another world. I do not forget the harm at the story's beginning, but I am moved by the film's belief that images can hold guilt, tenderness, and uncertainty together without explaining them away.

— Momo

Momo thinking about this film

Credits & versions

Version map

BFI Player Czech archive Version 75 min BFI Player identifies this Czech archive Version as 75 minutes and explicitly notes that it is around twenty minutes shorter than the traditional English-language Version. Source: BFI Player — Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans Runtime reference · Checked 2026-08-16

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