'Sleep Well My Baby' Is, Instead, Eye Opening

Sleep Well, My Baby (2018) is not your typical, garden variety narrative short film. The story tracks Eunmi as she journeys through the Jilin Province in China with her infant son after fleeing North Korea. The short is inspired by the very real plight of thousands of North Korean refugees who, year after year, attempt to escape their tyranny. Female refugees are often captured and trafficked in China while on their way to South Korea and sold as wives. When a subject matter that is objectively important is undertaken by people who can deliver it with cinematic authority, it has the capacity to inspire. Aaron & Winston Tao wrote and directed a potent film about diaspora, loss, and resilience. How do you establish perhaps one of the strongest and bravest characters that A Hot Set has ever seen in a short film, without assigning them even 1 line of diegetic dialogue? Take 7 minutes and find out.

The low-pitched squeal of a pig, chirping crickets, and the breaking of rich soil work with deep blue/green landscape shots to bring us into rural China, where a young woman named Eunmi (Sangeun Lee) is a captive of the man who purchased her. To say that this life is a miserable one would be a louche understatement. Thankfully, the Taos didn’t understate it at all. The sound design, the shot selection, and the editing are all striking in their own right and conspire to tell a story that, pound-for-pound, is one of the most powerful short films that you may ever watch. 

The setting feels isolated; as if help is nowhere nearby, and not getting any closer. There is grace in the direction of Aaron & Winston Tao. They found a way to convey these brutal hardships without pornagraphying. Care is taken to separate the viewer from a direct vantage point in cases of physical trauma, for instance. The motorcycle crash happens in our heads, as Eunmi reaches for the handlebars and we’re then fed a series of memories via flash-cuts, finally cutting to a cloud of smoke. When Eunmi is beaten - most of it happens off-screen, from a distance in the flickering light, or obfuscated through a whiskey glass. There is something about not painting the entire picture, but instead working with cinematographer Jared Fadel to build a scene that acts in part as a projection screen, onto which the imagination of the audience is left to fill in the gaps. In order to keep up with the film, we need to build out the in-between, and to do that is to plainly acknowledge just how brutal her circumstance really is. As an audience, we’re forced to confront this abuse on an internal level, as opposed to a visual one. It is even analogous to the North Korean situation in this way; these terrible things are happening, whether or not they're visible to us.

There is a tasteful cohesion to the editing in Sleep Well, My Baby. Some of the very first frames, for instance, insert shots of a spinning motorcycle wheel, a stray shoe, and an injured woman lying in the middle of a quiet road. These shots are fragments of what is coming and are useful upfront in soliciting the engagement of the audience. They inform us of an impending catastrophe on a narrative level, planting a flag that distinguishes it from a documentary film about North Korean refugeeism. A voiceover track is laid gently over a thick soundscape, buzzing with insects and muddy footsteps. The background noise changes as we enter a hut - where Eunmi and her child are being held - but this eerie hum is preserved, blending naturally into the claustrophobic sounds of radio static, the purr of an oscillating fan and the electric whine of cold, fluorescent lighting.

The drone footage employed in this film is stunning, as is the color. There is a particular frame where we're holding on to Eunmi's face as tears run down her cheeks. The expression on Lee's face, expertly lit in both cool and warm light, the subtle flicker of a TV reflected on her right cheek. The Tao's have drawn up the delicate, true story of Eunmi in an appropriately delicate manner. This film is proof positive of an adage about the film that seems to be especially true of short films; Watching things happen is more interesting than watching people talk about them. A woman is stripped of her identity, beaten mercilessly, and torn from her child. These are not things that are merely hinted toward. We're privy to the agony on Eunmi's face and the desperation in her screams as she is ripped from her infant daughter. We witness her captor raising his hand to her, or abusing her sexually. While Aaron & Winston Tao often choose to obscure these happenings with interesting edits or framing, they do not shy away from pointing them out. Sleep Well, My Baby does not rest on the power of its message alone. Instead, Aaron & Winston Tao take care to craft a piece of cinema worthy of imparting Eunmi's story.