Camp 14: Total Control Zone
SCREENING
October 27, 2013
7:00 PM / TIFF Bell Lightbox
W/ Q&A with Blaine Harden, author of “Escape from Camp 14″ (via Skype)
Buy Tickets
Germany, South Korea
2012 / 106m
Film Website
Proudly Co-Presented with:
Human Rights Watch
Born inside a North Korean prison camp as the child of political prisoners, Shin Dong-hyuk was raised in a world where all he knew was punishment, torture and abuse beyond imagination. After more than two decades of imprisonment, Shin escaped the camp in 2005 and subsequently became something of an international celebrity, touring Europe and North America to tell his story to human rights conferences and activist groups — but life on the outside proved to have its own challenges. Weaving intimate interviews with Shin together with anecdotes from a former camp guard and a member of the secret police, and interspersing them with brilliant animated sequences depicting key moments in Shin’s life, Marc Wiese’s fascinating documentary Camp 14: Total Control Zone is both a powerful story of survival and an evocative character study, showing the feelings of guilt, anger, remorse and complicity that are shared between both abused and abusers.
North Korea operates a network of political prison camps known as gwa-li-so, a word that strikes fear in North Koreans who know that the brutal forced labour, near-starvation rations, and abuse by prison guards means that being sent there is akin to a death sentence. With research based on testimonies of Shin and others who have managed to flee the country, Human Rights Watch is campaigning to establish a United Nations commission of inquiry to investigate crimes against humanity taking place in the gwa-li-so and other detention centres in the country. (Courtesy of TIFF.net)
* Toronto International Film Festival 2012 (Toronto, Canada) / Official Selection *
* Amsterdam International Documentary Film Festival 2012 (Amsterdam, Netherlands) / Official Selection *
* Human Rights Watch Film Festival 2012 (Multiple Cities) / Official Selection *