One of the greatest strengths of the documentary format is its ability to personalize
an issue, to tackle an abstract concept with characters and stories instead of figures
and statistics. To many, the forced labor camps of North Korea are one of these issues—we
know they exist, we know horrible things happen there, but we’re so far removed from
them that their everyday relevance is diminished.
Camp 14—Total Control Zone seeks to change that. It tells the hidden story of one of these prisons, where barbed-wire
fences contain lives that know only hard labor, hunger, and complete domination. The
political prisoners here receive no pardons, and their sentences never end. The only
way out is death, which can come at any time of any day, sometimes simply via the
whim of a guard with an itchy trigger finger.
The film centers around a young man named
Shin Dong-hyuk. Born in the prison camp, he grew up knowing nothing of the outside world. The idea
of “freedom” was inconceivable—his life was built around starvation and fear, orders
and beatings. That is, until he escaped at the age of 23 to China and eventually Seoul,
South Korea.
Shin’s story unfolds slowly, as the initial mysteries of how he came to be born in
the camp, what happened to his family, and his ultimate escape are revealed piece
by piece. Flashbacks to his youth are portrayed through haunting animations—they’re
sparse, static, and colorless but for the splash of the blood-red flags fluttering
on the execution grounds.
Shin’s interviews are quiet and contemplative, much like the mood of the overall picture.
They’re punctuated with long stretches of silence as he stares away, deep in thought.
Even when he shows the camera his torture-twisted, deformed arms, he doesn’t raise
his voice or show anger. The director, German-born
Marc Wiese, is smart to allow his camera to linger on Shin during these tense moments, and the
silence speaks volumes.
The stories of
Camp 14 that don’t directly involve Shin are just as visceral. Wiese manages to interview
two former guards, and their recollections are just as horrific. Both begin the film
as simple informants, describing the conditions and rules of the camp. But over the
course of their interviews, Wiese leads them into long-buried corners of memory, and
his cameras capture them slowly coming to terms with what they’ve done. When one of
them solemnly admits, “I never wanted to give an interview like this one,” it’s an
astonishing feat.
Camp 14 succeeds by doing what makes documentaries so effective: putting a face on a faceless
issue, a story where there are otherwise only statistics. Shin Dong-hyuk is no simple
mouthpiece against the evils of the regime, either. He’s a complex young man, confused
and overwhelmed by the demands of freedom like money, jobs, and navigating bright
Seoul megastores. The revelations of what happened to him and his family in the camp,
as well as his final, haunting admission that closes the film, test the truths of
the human psyche in the face of inhuman brutality.
Playing June 20, 12:15 PM, at the Newseum and June 23, 10:30 AM at AFI Silver Theatre
and Cultural Center.
Michael J. Gaynor has written about fake Navy SEALs, a town without cell phones, his Russian spy landlord, and many more weird and fascinating stories for the Washingtonian. He lives in DC, where his landlord is no longer a Russian spy.
