From Omeleto.
A man washes ashore.
THE CARGO is used with permission from Christopher Edgar. Learn more at https://instagram.com/cedgarmusic.
Lev is a Soviet prisoner who washes up on the beach in Hokkaido, Japan, in 1939. He’s on his way to a work colony to do penance for his crimes, but his boat capsized.
He’s taken in by a Japanese fisherman named Kaku, who takes him into his home. The two parties do not understand one another at all until they discover a mutual fondness for the same novel. They soon overcome their sharp cultural differences to forge an unlikely friendship, one that expands one another’s understanding of the world and their place in it.
Directed and written by Christopher Edgar, this elegant short historical drama captures the unlikely cultural interplay between two men of very different backgrounds. Told in a stately, well-observed style of storytelling that’s elegantly photographed and steadily paced, it carefully charts how these men forge a tenuous friendship based on growing understanding and mutual respect, a journey that forms the measured arc of the narrative.
The driving impulse of the storytelling is based more on character, with the writing taking care to build and then contrast its two main characters carefully. Lev is from the Soviet Union, where he was a professor who taught his students ideas outside the state’s approved norms. Kaku is a kindhearted family man and fisherman from Hokkaido, Japan, whose generous nature takes Lev into his home and family. He is curious about discussion and ideas outside of his isolated milieu, and he finds this in Lev’s company.
Despite Lev’s status as a prisoner — and the opportunity for escape presented to him in Japan — he still longs for the familiarity of his culture, where he at least knows what awaits and is expected of him. But his own reading of Japanese customs and ideas offends Kaku, nipping a potential friendship in the bud at first. As Lev and Kaku, actors John L. Curtis and Jonathan Taginaki have both a natural solidarity and a mutual skepticism, though Kaku is weighted more towards the former and Lev is weighted more towards the latter. But when things don’t go as planned, Lev realizes he must expand his own worldview to adapt and even flourish.
With a sweeping musical score and equally evocative visuals, THE CARGO has an expansive look and feel, but this is ultimately a story on a more intimate scale, focused on how two very different people find humor, accord and curiosity without giving up their cultural differences. The film posits difference as a place of expansion and growth, where the possibility of friendship exists with mutual respect. It’s a heart-warming and life-affirming theme — worth remembering in a world where differences often are still treated with suspicion, restriction or oppression.
