[HanCinema's Film Review] "Mother Land"

South Korea is not generally known for stop motion animation, and press material for "Mother Land" on the festival circuit made note of the fact that this is the first feature film anyone in South Korea has made in this style in forty five years. While "Mother Land" did get an official South Korean release in the holiday season of 2022, the fantasy story of a girl of the Yates tribe in Siberia trying to help her sick mother has only had limited distribution success. You're unlikely to find it under the title of "Mother Land" incidentally, as that title was a bad one.

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In South Korea the film now generally goes by the title 엄마의 땅: 그리샤와 숲의 주인, or Mother's Land: Grisha and the Forest Master. It's been dubbed into Chinese, too, and other languages too I expect, given the sudden interest in the film by HanCinema readers yesterday. But this obscurity is ill-deserved. "Mother Land" is a tremendously sweet, accessible film. Even if the story beats aren't exactly ambitious, it's always a joy to see stop motion in action.

This is particularly true as writer/director Park Jae-beom-IV spares no expense when it comes to trying to document the Yates tribal life to the best of his ability. "Mother Land" owes its origins in the 2010 SBS documentary The Last Tundra, and the visuals are quite blunt about just what life in Siberia entails. Krisha is a member of a family that raises, rides, and eats reindeer. She's a girl who knows how to fish and how to bleed meat, not because she's precocious, but because it's what's expected of her.

Krisha is from a very different world than the one we know- which is how she's able to talk herself into seeking out the red bear of legend to help her mother. Despite Krisha being framed sympathetically, the film is also centered on her vantage point in the sense that as a child, she has fanciful ideas about the way the world works. Yet these are never framed as being obviously naive or untrue to adults.

It's from this context that Vladmir enters the story- not as a member of the tribe, but as an outsider with a more practically minded interest in the red bear. Not quite a villain so much as someone with a fundamentally different view of how the world works, Vladmir is sinister yet not exactly monstrous. His story goes in a fairly predictable direction, as does Bazak, who inevitably comes to question his reasons for Vladmir.

I could tell you about the fairly straightforward political and ecological metaphors behind all this, but honestly, why bother? "Mother Land" is simple enough in its own explanations to be engaging to children, while the main draw for adults is the beautiful stop motion that neither romanticizes nor demonizes the world that Krisha merely understands as being her home. It's a pity an official English release of "Mother Land" is unlikely due to its niche audience. It's a very special little film.

Written by William Schwartz

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"Mother Land" is directed by Park Jae-beom-IV, and features Lee Yun-ji, Kim Seo-young, Lee Yong-nyeo, Kim Ye-eun, Kang Gil-woo, Lee Kwan-mok. Release date in Korea: 2023/01/25.