Sunlit Night is about a journey of an aspiring artist to the northern edge of the world where the sun never sets, even at night (during the summer months she visits).

The movie starts with an young artist Frances's work being ridiculed by three pompous critics. In the next few scenes, we see her whole life being thrown into a disarray. As she questions her future as an artist, her boyfriend dumps her. When she visits her parents home (which doesn't have much space for her and her sister),she finds out that her sister is getting married and her parents are splitting up. Also, the artist residency she was applying for has been rejected. Thus, she is has no place to stay (except for sharing an airbed with her dad in his cramped up studio). Her agent tells her that there is an opportunity to be an assistant to an artist in oblivion (she even assumed he was dead) in Norway. With nowhere else to go, she decides to take up the opportunity.

She makes the journey to Lofoten to meet the artist Nils Auermann, an artist whose work hasn't received much acclaim and he now leads a secluded life in a fish-factory converted into a place where he lives alone. He is trying make his mark by painting a whole barn yellow and get it recognized as one of the highlighted piece of art in Norway. He has a month to complete the work and it would be then inspected by the Norwegian Art Institute. He brushes of all the attempts by Frances to create a connect and tells her that there is long hours of hard work ahead of her in the coming days as this project is very important to him. Over a period of time he realizes her effort is helping him meet the deadline and despite a having very different personalities, they compliment each other well.

The barn is in a modern viking village which has a viking museum and a viking community that try to live a traditional viking life. Frances tries to explore this community and ends up meeting Yasha, a baker from US who is here for his father's burial (who wished for a traditional viking burial). As she spends the moment where he comes to term with the grief of losing his father, she realizes the how a painting captures such a strong emotion, something she has never painted.

The work at the barn is done and she is working alone at the barn the night before inspection. Yasha comes over to tell her that he is leaving the next day. They end up having a passionate night and are lying there naked when the folks from the institute come in for inspection.

Frances realizing how she messed it all up for Nils, flees from the scene and then leaves for back home without meeting Nils. When back home, she gets a mail from Nils informing her that the barn has been accepted and releases her of her guilt. In a turn of events, her parents too decide not to split.

The movie ends with her showing some paintings she did while she was in Norway, to the same critics, who now think she is making progress. As she tries to summarize her experience in Norway, she contemplates if she was running away from her life, was she running towards it, did she mess up or did she make most of it or if she got where she needed to go? She is not sure what to make of it.

The movie was beautifully pictured, capturing some wonderful landscape and the music was complimenting well and the acting was reasonably good. The screenplay was adapted from a novel and didn't do justice to the story, probably providing too little a context for viewers to associate with. It looked patchy in places as one couldn't associate why some plots were shown in much detail and other weren't explored enough, especially the relationship that Frances has with Nils and Yasha were not sufficiently developed. It's aesthetically beautiful to watch and has the heart in the right place. Just wish the screenplay was a bit more comprehensive.

I found this film best to just flow with. Don't worry so much about motives and where it's going. The film itself is a work of art, like the art projects in the film... getting worked out, part of something larger, of people, of place, of journeys. Beautiful!!

This movie was beautiful, and Slate certainly delivered a great performance of a messy, figuring-out-life artist who makes a bold move. But the relationship they introduced, which could have been left as a wonderful stranger dynamic, totally took away from story. It felt abrupt and unnecessary, and it diminished the very real characters they had established fairly well in the first half of the film.