29/10/2025 - Awarded Best Feature at Animest, the evocative animation explores clandestine relationships and political oppression in North Korea

The Square by South Korean director Kim Bo-sol took home the Best Feature Film Award at the 20th edition of Animest - Bucharest International Animation Film Festival (3–12 October). In his animated feature debut, the Korean newcomer crafts a moody, minimalist romance that is as much about political suffocation as it is about human yearning for connection. Set in the snow-veiled stillness of the North Korean capital of Pyongyang, this bittersweet tale follows Isak Borg, a Swedish diplomat, as he tries to navigate the cold indifference of his surroundings until a chance encounter with a local traffic officer, Bok-joo, offers him a fragile glimpse of warmth.

Despite his fluency in Korean and his familial ties to the country (his grandmother fled from South Korea to Sweden), Isak is a foreigner in every sense – visibly, culturally, emotionally. Strangers stare at his blonde hair and blue eyes with suspicion, pulling their children away from him in fear. Even his colleague, the taciturn interpreter Lee Myeong-jun, speaks to him reluctantly, as if doing him a favour. Meeting the sweet and gentle Bok-joo gives Isak a reason to stay. But delaying his departure from Pyongyang raises further suspicions from the state’s secret services, who task Lee Myeong-jun with spying on him. Isak and Bok-joo’s love proves to be an ordeal for all parties involved.

“We’re destined to be lonely”, says the Swedish ambassador, Isak’s senior colleague. The filmmaker illustrates this isolation through a dark, subdued palette of blacks, greys and browns. Isak’s days alternate between sparse business meetings, solitary dinners and long bike rides through the snowy streets of the capital.

Pyongyang is perpetually blanketed in snow, and Bo-sol frequently concentrates on the swirling flakes while the rest of the frame resides in shallow focus. The frigidity is visible in the flushed cheeks of the main protagonists, rendered in red pencil strokes that suggest physical chill, as well as in the quiet heat of infatuation between Isak and Bok-joo. The melancholic score by Yongjin Jeong deepens the atmosphere of forbidden intimacy. Through his artwork, Bo-sol subtly conveys alienation and oppression. The city’s wide, empty alleys and cold concrete buildings reinforce the feeling of constant surveillance and muted paranoia.

Isak often invites Lee Myeong-jun for a drink and shares boiled eggs with him, but Lee Myeong-jun keeps refusing. Not because he is a bad friend, but because he simply can’t afford the risk. It is in Lee Myeong-jun’s character that the film finds its deepest complexities. Born and raised in North Korea, he has no other choice but to agree to serve as an informant for the state’s secret police. When he does ultimately report on the clandestine affair, Bok-joo has to run away, making Isak look for him in every square in the city.

While The Square doesn’t explicitly address the historical tension between North and South Korea, the political alienation of the North haunts every frame. In one particularly striking scene, Isak asks Lee Myeong-jun for help, unaware that Lee is secretly reporting on him. Their conversation takes place in a vast public square, framed by a monumental statue of the North Korean leader and an endless flight of stairs, an image that reinforces the themes of power and isolation. After the end of the Korean War in 1953, the peninsula was split in two. Isak’s grandmother fled to Sweden, where she raised him, and through her, he learned Korean. Bo-sol drew inspiration for his story from a real-life account of a Swedish diplomat who, after spending three years in North Korea, confessed that he was never able to share even a drink with his colleagues due to the relentless surveillance and control there.

While Isak is depicted as the classic romantic hero, open-hearted, wide-eyed and wrapped in a scarf, it is the emotionally restrained Lee Myeong-jun who becomes the emotional core of the story. Initially an opaque and cold figure, he gradually emerges as a sympathetic one, trapped in a system that demands betrayal as a condition for survival. Dressed in dark clothing, with sharp, serious features, Lee represents a flicker of inner light within the layered fog of perpetual paranoia. In the end, he is no longer a mere agent of the regime, but a man who dares to openly question it. When asked why he decided to help Isak, he replies, “Maybe I’m lonely.”