Tuesday, January 15th, 2013 Screening of "Camp 14 - Total Control Zone" | Q&A with Journalist Blaine Harden

Description

Screening of Camp 14 – Total Control Zone
Followed by Q&A with Journalist Blaine Harden conducted by Professor Lynette Ong (Associate Professor, Department of Political Science & Asian Institute, Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto)

Description by Cameron Bailey, TIFF:
An enthralling documentary portrait of twenty-nine-year-old Shin Dong-huyk, who was born and spent the first two decades of his life behind the barb wire of a North Korean labour camp, until his dramatic escape launched him into an outside world he had never known.

Shin Dong-Huyk was born inside a North Korean prison camp. The only world he knew was one of punishment, torture and abuse beyond imagination. And yet, because this was his world, he saw it as normal. Camp 14 – Total Control Zone is a fascinating portrait of a young man who grew up shaped by violence, and still found the spirit within to free himself.

Director Marc Wiese shapes this documentary as a powerful study in survival, quietly drawing details from Shin in a series of interviews, and contrasting that with the corroborating stories of two former camp guards, and animated scenes that illustrate Shin’s life in evocative monochrome.

The child of political prisoners, Shin grew up in a world where breaking any rule was punishable by death. Sitting on the floor of his apartment, he recalls witnessing his first public execution, his unthinking denouncement of his mother and brother, his seven months of daily torture, and his first experience of human affection, at age fourteen, in a cold, bare prison cell. In 2004, he meets a newly arrived inmate who has done the unimaginable: watched television, slept in a bed, tasted chicken. Dreaming of life outside the camp, Shin finally escapes and later becomes a sort of celebrity, touring Europe and North America to tell his story to international conferences and human rights groups. But life on the outside proves just as alienating and isolated as in the camp: when Shin travels to Los Angeles to meet a group of eager American activists, the disparity between their shared sense of community and purpose and Shin’s conditioned solitude is palpable and potent.

Wiese has a keen eye for these moments of contrast, allowing space for uncomfortable silences and observing contradictions with a pointed lack of comment as Shin recounts his story. To hear the testimony of inmate and guards, abused and abusers, is to witness surprisingly shared feelings of guilt, anger, remorse and complicity.