The scourge of human trafficking is a concept that rightly disgusts most people, usually portrayed and understood as the work of gangs and organised crime, kidnapping and forcing people into lives of sex slavery and untold misery. So it’s rather a shock, despite the title, when teenage Jisun (Sora Baek) implores her sick mother to sell her as a means to buy the medicine that they cannot afford. So begins a winding tale of a young girl torn from the insular confines of North Korea thrust out into the wider world.
Sell Me is a strange play in many ways. Opening with a video montage of images of Baek pushing a heavy wooden chest across various stages, intercut with images of North Korea, it sets a firm tone, telling the audience in stark imagery that this is a tale birthed of struggle, poverty and rigid conformism. But it’s also not a conventional narrative. The story, inspired largely from true stories of real North Korean defectors, doesn't follow the paths that would be expected, rarely spooling out like a story, and more like oddly wistful memories clashing in a hazy recollection. It also isn’t the horror story that the title and opening moments would perhaps suggest.
Baek’s performance is emotional and empathetic, filled with wide-eyed naïveté and confusion as the teenage girl is confronted by the alienness of mainland China and the sudden lack of the conforming restrictions, as well as some harsh brutalities. She tells the story with a gentle ease, flitting into Korean for sometimes extended moments without translation. But it manages not to seem alienating, rather cements the flavour of the story in a distinct fashion.
The one aspect which doesn’t entirely work are latter moments where the story flashes back, adding in contextual information, which almost flies in the face of earlier scenes and is a little confusing. Equally, there are early narrative threads that simply are abandoned late on, but this is a minor point in a piece that feels like a fragment of life, ending almost as suddenly as it begins, but with an emotional weightiness that earns the heavy applause.
It’s a powerful and fascinating insight into a country few from the west will ever see, and even fewer will ever truly understand.