Director – Eiji Han Shimizu – 2020 – Japan, Indonesia – 93m
****
From the Annecy 2020 Online Animation Festival
The life of an ordinary family living in Pyongyang is interrupted when their father disappears and their mother is unable to tell their infant son Yo-han and his younger sister Mi-hee exactly what has happened to him, although she reassures them that everything will be fine. A few days later, in the middle of the night, there’s a knock at the door of their apartment. Officials come in and search the place, make the family pack a few belongings then put them into a truck.
On the ensuing journey, there are no stops for the lavatory. The truck takes them to a political camp where they will be imprisoned although it’s never quite clear what offence they have committed. Father is apparently an enemy of the state, even though he appears to have an exemplary record. Despite promises that the family will see him soon, he’s not in the camp to which they’ve been taken. They are going to have to fend for themselves there.
Mother does her best to keep her kids’ spirits up – no mean task when you’re living on meagre rations and forced to do backbreaking work shifts harvesting crops in the fields (woman and girls) or working in the mines (men and boys). Worse is to come. If well fed officials’ kids outside the barbed wire fence want you to “get down on your knees and grunt like the pig that you are”, the guards will insist that you do so. If you play along, you may get thrown precious scraps of food to supplement your rations.
A small team of prisoners help maintain order in exchange for slightly better working conditions. It’s easy enough to get in with them if, as Yo-han does, you inform on an old man who is stealing rabbits to feed his sick wife. But this may not be such a good idea as it’ll make you enemies too.
The script is based on numerous interviews with former inmates who’ve escaped to freedom. Indeed, the film opens and closes with one such man giving a TED Talk to an audience in Vancouver. Needless to say, the film details his escape towards the end. Other details include the shooting of men who’ve failed to escape, wither in the act when they’re shot down by guards on the snowy hills outside the camp or in public executions. Also dealt with by firing quad are so-called “whores”, women who’ve become pregnant after being raped by guards.
Working life in the camp is not without its perils. Yo-han is lucky to escape a mudslide which buries a number of fellow inmates. He and others do their best to rescue the trapped an buried, many of whom are clearly still alive, until they are ordered at gunpoint to stop and get back to work. One hand bursting through the debris continues to wave desperately but its unfortunate owner is not going to be rescued. Elsewhere, a pretty unpleasant torture scene involves red hot (or orange hot) metal implements.
It’s pretty harrowing stuff which may well prove an eye-opener to audiences. The use of computer animation is highly effective and really gets under the skin of the characters. However the script tries a little to hard to emphasize the basic goodness of people who are shown to mostly operate within the bounds of human decency.
This may be due in part to the centrality to the narrative of the children’s mother who is constantly comforting them and instilling a sense of right and wrong along with compassion for their fellow inmates. Yo-han struggles with this, insisting that, for instance, his hard earned food not being given to more vulnerable prisoners outside of their family unit, but in the end comes round to the idea of looking out for and helping others.
As a result, the film pales beside the part survivor vox pop live action documentary, part camp conditions re-creation animation movie Camp 14: Total Control Zone (Marc Wiese, 2012), one of the most truly harrowing films I’ve seen, which paints a picture of children born in these camps growing up in a terrifying, dog eat dog world totally devoid of such concepts as right and wrong, or morality. True North, by comparison, is soft soap – it tries a little too hard to tone down the more horrific aspects in an attempt to make its subject matter more accessible to audiences.
True North plays in the Annecy Animation Festival which is taking place in a special online edition this year right now. Here’s the trailer:
Festivals
2020
Annecy Animation Festival special online edition:
Monday, June 15th to Tuesday, June 30th.
Festival trailer: