Full Ship was a 1967 film set in a fishing village on a remote island. Poverty and tradition kept the islanders in a vicious cycle with seemingly no way out.

Gom Chi is a fifty-year-old captain of a fishing boat and the father of new baby boy. Two of his three grown sons died at sea while the third refuses to sail. The sailors and Gom owe money to the owner of the boat who takes most of their haul to pay for gas and union fees. If they don’t catch fish, not only do they not get paid, they owe for the use of the boat. They are paid pitifully even when a “full ship” returns, sometimes only hulled barley. Gom Chi dreams of owning a boat and when his boss finds out, calls in Gom Chi’s debts.

Full Ship demonstrated the trials of living in a subsistence community and much like old coal mine towns where people owed their soul to the company store, the villagers were always in debt to the boat owners. Despite having lost two sons to the sea, Gom Chi could not fathom why his son Do Sum wouldn’t join the other men on the boats. Villagers and family whispered that time in the military and his education had made him “wild.” Gom’s wife did not want either Do Sam or her new baby to become bewitched by the sea as Gom Chi had. Do Sam’s sister, Seul Seul, was not opposed to leaving the island, but her fiancé Yeon Cheol was happy eating yams and being with her, with no desire to move to “land.” Beom Soe, a former islander who made money on land, came back and had his gaze set on Seul Seul. He also brought a dark secret with him.

The last twenty minutes were dominated by tragedy after tragedy as the Dragon King reminded the villagers that they did not control the sea. And just as with the miserly boat owner, the bill for depending on the sea, came due.

“To escape from an inch of regret, to leave behind an inch of suffering, those people were thrown into the providence of the sea.”

2 July 2024