Buoyancy

Rodd Rathjen's 2019 film follows a fourteen-year-old Cambodian boy who leaves home to escape his family's poverty. He is sold to a broker and put to work as a slave on a Thai-flagged fishing trawler. Sarm Heng took the role with no acting experience. The film does not offer exploitation as a distant lesson in humanity. On the boat, time is reduced to a cycle of hauling nets and sleeping; there is no route out, no land in sight, and the captain's violence is routine. What the boy becomes in order to survive is the real subject, and it goes somewhere that gives the viewer no comfort. It screened in the Panorama section at the Berlin Film Festival and won the Ecumenical Jury Prize. It was Australia's submission for the 2020 Academy Awards and was not nominated. Who it's for: viewers able to sit with fiction about modern slavery. Who it's not for: anyone who wants distance from violence and psychological coercion; the film shows killing and torture directly and does not soften the boy's hardening.