About the Film
Height of the Wave, winner of the Special Jury Prize at the Locarno Film Festival, seeks to examine corrupt souls, justifying their greed as a means of survival, and circumventing the laws of unjust human nature and fateful isolation. When a police commissioner arrives on a remote island, she is confronted with a collective secret; a secret that old men try to hide, yet may be revealed by the carelessness of the young.
The seaside village struggles in a competition to win a financial grant from the central state, which would qualify it to become an industrial and tourist destination. Since the grant is sizeable, and the ethics are shaky, any rift in the consensus means the death of the "rural commune," which has been practicing fishing as a profession for generations.
Between the commissioner’s investigations, and the stubbornness of the village’s mayor in his quest to win the government fund at any cost, the consensus is decided in favor of sacrificing the heroine of a hidden scandal, young Yea-Eun. Since an early age, Yea-Eun has been subjected to continuous sexual exploitation, after her parents died at sea, and she miraculously survived. The little girl grew in the hands of a wise old villager, and his son Sonu (director Jung-bum Park), who behaves like a righteous prophet, yet remains incapable of decisive action. He justifies his passiveness with a defeated statement: “The villagers have been blinded by greed and money. You are being punished (…) and I am a coward.”
With a portable camera, breathtaking natural locations, cinematic austerity, and a cast of mostly local villagers, Park aims—as has been the case since his debut The Journals of Musan (2009)—to shed light on human vileness and social disintegration, fuelled by greed and lust. The villagers’ disgrace just may be exposed through a small box in which Yea-Eun collected icons of her repeated rape. Depicting opposite realms, the film closes in on the world of the police commissioner as a victim of separation and divorce, leading her to explore a rather foreign territory. On the other hand, Yea-Eun's world, filled with oppression and misfortune, drives her to find reconciliation and solace in a rare friendship with the commissioner’s daughter, Sanya, who inspires her to overcome her debilitating fear of the ocean, no matter how high the waves rise.
Ziad Al Khozai
