Canaan has long been called the Promised Land, where “milk rivers wash the sour banks” – a place that is always “somewhere” and never “here.” The main character - Koryo-saram - a descendant of Koreans resettled in the early XX century in Uzbekistan, spent his whole life in the inhospitable realities of multicultural Tashkent and fully imbued with a criminal life. Becoming a police officer, he only more plunge into the world of drugs, mafia, corruption, murder, while not ceasing to dream of distant Korea as a personal cherished Canaan.
Despite the whole range of tasks faced by the novice director Ruslan Park (like his characters are Uzbek of Korean origin), his debut was definitely successful. Implementation in many places inevitably plot lame and stalls in technical terms (for example, with the sound here capital problems). But not every film manages to show a sufficiently convincing criminal drama, along the way walk through the themes of drug addiction and cultural identity, wrapping everything in the concept of permanent spiritual transformation. At the same time, the film manages to do without drama and flirting with thriller elements under the oppressive soundtrack. Park is not a formalist at all, no one cares about the emotions of the viewer here. Why create artificial darkness when it is right here in front of the camera?
A separate plus of the tape is that the creators did not follow the simple path and did not choose between a rough black woman and an elegant vendetta in Korean. This would be fundamentally at odds with the film’s general hyper-realistic manner and, essentially, the open ending, which can be mistaken for both a bright rebirth and a cyclical return to the sins of the past. Borders, cities and stamps in passports change, but everywhere people indulge in the same vices, and all the same heroin pours into the milky Korean Sea, which, judging by the main character’s gaze, turned out to be just another empty symbol of a happy life.