Married with a daughter, a modest fisherman from North Korea goes out on a boat. The engine fails by jamming the net, and the boat drifts toward South Korea.

Here the man suffers fierce interrogation, violence and abuse.

South Korean prejudices against the communist inhabitants of the North do not hesitate to come to the fore.

The fisherman himself does not accept the proposal to rebuild his family in the South, which seems instead to be a must-have offer from the "democratic" capitalist side.

On the other hand, the Southerners cannot agree to send back to the dictatorship a citizen who can be "saved" from it.

He is therefore accused of being a spy, because everyone potentially can be but the fisherman will never agree to defect.

The drive and when he is released will see him grappling with his stubborn opposition to the temptation to see the other world because according to his culture " the more he sees the unhappier he will be."

He is impressed to see a prostitute being beaten, whom he will defend by asking her how it is possible to sell one's body in a "free" country. He does not understand how it is permissible to suffer such humiliation in the country of 'abundance.

He feels like a fish that has fallen into the net the poor fisherman suspended between the impossibility of deserting and never seeing his beloved family again.

He also witnesses the practiced suicide by biting the tongue of one of his comrade-spies from the North.

He is offered to return to his country only if he reveals the locations of missile and nuclear bases.

As is often the case, those in charge, in situations where violence is practiced, do not take the lead and delegate to subordinates decisions for which they might later be charged.

His exasperated nationalism and the help of a control officer will enable him to return home but even here he will be subjected to the same harassment, abuse, and violence that he had suffered from the "enemies."

According to those in charge in the North, he would have to abandon the boat even though it was his only paid-for possession in ten years and his only source of income.

Used for political propaganda, he found that he received no recognition for his loyalty to the regime for not yielding to any capitalist temptations and no help from the economic point of view, seeing his fishing license suspended.

Destroyed, left to his own devices, humiliated and now permanently disillusioned, the fisherman will opt for a final solution.

A film, Kim Ki-duk's, that lives up to his continually engaged artistic standard through overwhelming stories on the social, moral, political and economic levels. Nothing is ever left to chance in the works of the Korean director, who continues to surprise with his ability to affect, in an absolutely artistic way, the experience of a country and a world at the mercy of an unstoppable capitalist drift.

Dry, and deliberately essential, the narrative does not yield to distractions of any kind, nor to patheticism of any kind. No digressions are allowed for such a radical, extreme, stark theme.

A film that tells a story, between North and South Korea, seemingly confined to this area, emblematic and inevitably descriptive of a much broader reality if observed with a closer and more analytical gaze.

How to make film art a strategic tool of political information: just ask Kim Ki-duk

27-Jun-2023 by Beatrice