Admittedly, I walked away from Son of the Sunshine with the feeling that the film I’d just seen was pretty but forgettable but when a film sits with you through the next screening for for two days, it’s clear that Ryan Ward’s feature film debut is anything but forgettable.

Ward writes, directs and stars as Sonny, a young man well outside social circles. He spends his time wondering around town, visiting a spot which is important to his life though it’s not quite clear how, his mother is a drug addict, he doesn’t know his father and to life a little more difficult, he suffers from Tourette’s Syndrome. Ready to make a change, he agrees to partake in an experimental surgery that will cure him of his illness and though the surgery works, it has another side effect: it kills Sonny’s ability to heal and cure people.

Ward’s film is anything but easy. Fantastical elements aside, Sonny’s life is difficult and complicated. As the story moves along, we see Sonny leave home, fall in love for the first time, discover his family’s dark secret and come full circle from being cured to relapse and the trip is anything but sweet. Though it occasionally feels like there are simply too many threads being pulled, Ward manages to keep them all taught and within the confines of the story he is telling, the story of a young man discovering that sometimes life isn’t meant to be easy.

Far from ordinary, Son of the Sunshine has turned into a bit of a surprise, a film which keeps coming back, nagging and constantly asking for more attention. I may need to see this a second time before the festival wraps up.

Though it has played widely at festivals since its premiere at Slamdance, Son of the Sunshine is still without a distributor, a sad fact for a film that screams for additional viewings.