Breaths Trapped in an Empty 'Square'... A Fleeting Love That Melts the Colorless Wasteland [Slate]

Kim Bosol’s Animated Film 'Gwangjang'
Anatomy of the North Korean Regime in the Guise of Romance
'Invisible Prison' Built from Noise and Darkness

Animation Movie 'Gwangjang' Still Cut

They say love knows no borders. Yet, there are some borders so cold that even love freezes in its tracks.

The animated film 'Gwangjang' tells the story of an impossible love between Bori, a foreign diplomat stationed in Pyongyang, and Bokju, a Pyongyang traffic officer. This is not simply a 'Romeo and Juliet' narrative set against the backdrop of division. Rather, it is a political and sociological text cloaked in the guise of a melodrama. Director Kim Bosol follows the poignant emotional journey of the two protagonists but devotes even more effort to capturing the atmosphere of North Korean society in which they exist. As a result, the film demonstrates how human dignity is suffocated, and yet how it manages to breathe, however faintly, within a controlled society.

The film’s social consciousness is evident from its distinctive animation style. Instead of the vibrant colors typically expected in animation, the film is rendered in subdued grays, dull greens, and the red hues symbolic of propaganda. The outlines of the characters are also rough, not smooth. This coarse texture visually declares that the colorless city, stripped of vitality, is not a place to live but a vast detention camp. The faint yellow light that gently flickers only in the moments when the two lovers face each other on this desolate canvas feels all the more poignant and precarious.

Animation Movie 'Gwangjang' Still Cut

The desolation depicted in the animation is closely tied to the irony of the space itself. The title, 'Gwangjang' (Square), originally refers to an open space where people gather, communicate, and enjoy freedom. In the film, however, it is either thoroughly empty or filled only with mobilized crowds. The two protagonists cannot even whisper words of love. They are constantly searching for dimly lit alleys or hidden rooms, always beyond the reach of watchful eyes.

What fills the visual emptiness is auditory violence. The streets of Pyongyang are far from quiet. Propaganda broadcasts blare from giant speakers, the sound of soldiers’ boots, and piercing sirens continuously press down on the air, to the point of invading even personal thoughts. In contrast, the moments the lovers share are marked by a silence so deep that even their breathing is inaudible-a succession of stillness created by the extreme tension of not being discovered, like a scream without a sound.

The character who grounds the narrative, preventing it from devolving into a clich?d anti-communist film or a melodramatic tearjerker, is Myungjun, the interpreter. As both a guardian of the regime and the 'eyes' that surveil the couple, he is portrayed as the most three-dimensional figure in the film. The highlight is when, from the shadows, he witnesses the desperate gazes of the lovers and confronts the humanity he had long sealed away deep within himself. This encounter becomes the driving force that leads him to risk everything to arrange the lovers' final meeting. Compassion is not a grand act of rebellion against the system; it is closer to an instinctive struggle to confirm, even for a moment, that he is a living, breathing human being rather than just a cog in a suffocating machine.

Animation Movie 'Gwangjang' Still Cut

The animation 'Gwangjang' borrows this sorrowful longing to gaze upon the barrenness of an era where even love is forbidden. The square is closed, and love is thwarted. Yet, even in this frozen wasteland, there are people whose hearts still beat. By capturing their faint warmth through its stark animation, the film proves a paradoxical truth: what these characters needed was not a grand ideological stage, but rather a narrow, precarious gap-just enough space for two people to stand face to face and breathe.