Corpse Fishing

There are some very strange jobs out there. From ethical hackers to people that line up in queues for a living, there are even professional sleepers, you wonder how people in those professions ever found out about those jobs and decided it was a career that they wanted to pursue. Perhaps the strangest job of all is featured in ‘Corpse Fishing’, and if not the weirdest then definitely the most morbid. Yet though the film is morbid, it is nonetheless touching and emotional in parts, and ultimately probes deep topics with tenderness and beauty.

The film follows Yan (who is played by Harmonie Yen), a young woman who runs a karaoke stand on the beach, and seems fairly miserable with her surroundings. She lives in the Hubei Province in central China, and her existence seems to trundle on monotonously until one dark night a man named Old Bo (who is played by Jizhong Zhang) turns up, disturbing her karaoke stand with his pungent smell.
Old Bo owns a boat and seems to live there. He’s no ordinary fisherman however, instead of catching fish he instead catches corpses of those that have found their way into the sea. He sells them back to the families, who are all desperately seeking solace and the return of their missing loved ones. Yan just happens to be missing her father, and, with some desperate haggling and convincing, manages to find her way onto the boat, where she is confronted by the grim reality of Old Bo’s job.

Old Bo is almost certainly mad - how could you not be in a job like that - naming all his corpses and seeming to relish their company, yet at the same time he strikes a sympathetic figure. He lives more with the dead than with the living, and the the toll that that has taken on his mental health is plain to see.

The film follows Yan (who is played by Harmonie Yen), a young woman who runs a karaoke stand on the beach, and seems fairly miserable with her surroundings. She lives in the Hubei Province in central China, and her existence seems to trundle on monotonously until one dark night a man named Old Bo (who is played by Jizhong Zhang) turns up, disturbing her karaoke stand with his pungent smell.

Old Bo owns a boat and seems to live there. He’s no ordinary fisherman however, instead of catching fish he instead catches corpses of those that have found their way into the sea. He sells them back to the families, who are all desperately seeking solace and the return of their missing loved ones. Yan just happens to be missing her father, and, with some desperate haggling and convincing, manages to find her way onto the boat, where she is confronted by the grim reality of Old Bo’s job.

Old Bo is almost certainly mad - how could you not be in a job like that - naming all his corpses and seeming to relish their company, yet at the same time he strikes a sympathetic figure. He lives more with the dead than with the living, and the the toll that that has taken on his mental health is plain to see. Writer-director Jean Liu paints both her characters in full colour, giving them the perfect balance of depth and an enigmatic, mysterious background. They feel real and fleshed out, and their conversations are beautifully written to contain meaningful questions about mortality and loss, and yet they never seem to be pontificating.

Nevertheless, ‘Corpse Fishing’ is a captivating film by Jean Liu, with an interesting, unique narrative and bond between its two main characters, that leaves you thinking long after it has drawn to a close.