Buoyancy
As I type this review and as you read it — right this very second — there are some 200,000 men and boys being held as “sea slaves” aboard Thai fishing ships that catch the herring that ends up in the canned pet foods that stack so prettily on American supermarket shelves. In the wrenching new film, Buoyancy, Australian writer-director Rodd Rathjen offers a fictionalized account of one boy’s experience on one of those ships.
At 14, Chakra (Sarm Heng) is realizing that the daily grind of working the rice fields alongside his family in Cambodia is all he’ll ever know. Angry, he runs away to find more prosperous work in Thailand but finds himself tricked and sold to a fishing boat captain known as Rom Ran (Thanawut Kasro). A relatively young man who’s spend his life on the sea, Rom Ran finds true joy in exerting a brutal, unforgiving power over his naïve young crew.
One worker who is perceived as weak is thrown into the sea while another who dares confront Rom Ran is killed in a hellishly elaborate ceremony involving other slave trawlers called in for the occasion — death as an occasion to party. Chakra watches the horrors in silence, but he’s clearly taking mental notes and appears to be trying to decide if he can live with doing evil to escape evil. Buoyancy has the tension of a good thriller and the moral resonance of a truth too terrible to be fiction. (Chuck Wilson)