Using his trademark assemblage of esoteric costume and visual metaphors, Congolese-Belgian hitmaker and filmmaker Baloji explores the practice of skin lightening in black communities. Euphemistically described as ‘brightening’ or ‘toning’, skin bleaching takes many innocuous forms—such as creams, buffs and soaps—to deal with hyperpigmentation, but is more often used by women to emulate Eurocentric beauty standards.

"Never look at the sun is an expression I heard growing up," says Baloji. "Never look at the sun and don’t play under it because you're dark enough. It's a way parents try to protect their children, but this has side effects."

"Ancestral patterns combined with modern prejudices and stigma explain skin bleaching," Baloji continues. "We can’t criticize the practice because it’s rooted in cultural conceptions, interpretations, and questions of self-consciousness." 

Baloji anchors Never Look At The Sun around a fictional lightening product that the film’s protagonist ceremoniously bathes herself in. The director covers the lead in both white lace and heavy fabrics, shadow and spotlight to play with themes of darkness and light. "I know a lot of people who have experienced skin bleaching," says Baloji. "It's never done to reject their Black or African identity but more to decrease the effect darker skin has in society."

The film’s poem, narrated by decolonial thinker and race relations speaker Dorrie Wilson, is a declaration on the beauty of dark skin, with her words acting as a counterweight to the character’s chemical love affair with bleaching. 

"Thandi Loewenson—the writer of the poem—made me discover some words of Christina Sharp that resonate deeply in me," says Baloji. "'Beauty is not luxury, rather it is a way of creating possibility in the space of enclosure.'"