Buoyancy

Chakra is a 14 year old young man who lives in Cambodia and works in a rice field. In search of independence, and with the intention of helping his family financially, he decides to contact a trader so that he can travel to Thailand and make his dreams come true. However, when he manages to get to Bangkok, he realizes that he has been tricked into being sold as a slave to a fishing boat. Together with other comrades, Chakra will be subjected to torture, working days of up to 22 hours without a plate of food and suffering constant threats to his integrity. With his dignity at rock bottom, Chakra knows that it will not be easy to escape, so he decides to take control of the boat.

Rodd Rathjen is an Australian film director, who graduated in Cinema at the Victorian College of Arts in 2010. He made his debut in Cannes with Tau Seru in India in 2013. He subsequently won the Best Australian Short Film Award at MIFF 2013, and was screened at over 50 international festivals, where he was repeatedly awarded. One day, he was surprised to receive an article on a subject that was unfamiliar to him: human trafficking on fishing boats in Thailand. As a result of this, he carried out a brief investigation that led him to realise that this was a cruel reality to which thousands of Cambodians and Burmese are subjected. With Bouyancy, his first feature film, Rathjen wanted to raise international awareness of this cruel reality.