Even seasoned journalists allowed to enter North Korea find it near impossible to get frank interviews with its citizens, let alone footage that captures life in the isolated communist nation. The totalitarian government rarely allows glimpses beyond stiff guards marching in parades, statues of its deceased first leader Kim Il Sung and other controlled images.
Yet, in a new film, director Andrzej Fidyk finds a novel way to shine a light on brutal places little known to the modern world: North Korean concentration camps. The result is the powerful and groundbreaking documentary, Yodok Stories.
As Fidyk tells it, it would have been nearly impossible to take a camera and crew to the actual concentration camps, so the Polish filmmaker came up with the idea to recreate the experiences of prisoners and guards through a musical. He tracked down Jung Sung San, a survivor of Yodok concentration camp who had escaped to South Korea in the mid-1990s. San persuaded the former theater director, who had watched his father get stoned to death during his imprisonment, to channel his despair into a theatrical performance. What resulted was Yodok Story, one of the most successful musicals staged in South Korea. Fidyk’s documentary, Yodok Stories, smoothly weaves footage of the musical and rehearsals with interviews of former inmates.
One of the most moving stories comes from Kim Young Soon who survived eight years of imprisonment and torture at Yodok. Her anguish continues even after her 2003 escape to South Korea because she is unable to visit the graves of her child and parents who died in the camp. She thinks her offense may have been a comment she made about Kim Jong Il’s marriage. Even something as minor as mentioning a bump on the current leader’s neck is illegal and can throw generations of a family in prison. Indeed, some 200,000 North Koreans are still imprisoned today.
An unnerving scene involves An Myong Chol — unnerving because the man looks so amiable. Yet the former inmate once worked as a prison guard at four North Korean concentration camps until 1994. In the film, he calmly details torture methods. He also describes how dogs, trained to smell the rot of prisoners, once escaped camp and attacked innocent school girls. He recalls dogs ripping out one’s throat and another’s intestine. The camp commander’s response: “Well-trained dogs.”
These dark stories are told against the backdrop of modern South Korea, where few are aware of what happens to their countrymen and women north of the 38th parallel. Tales of starvation both in and out of camp, cruelty, control, and suffering are interspersed between scenes of flashing neon-lit city streets, open market stalls, ice rinks and amusement parks. Yodok Stories offers viewers a compelling reason to care about average North Koreans beyond the context of a nuclear threat and its unpredictable and eccentric ruler Kim Jong Il, who of late is making headlines again because of rumors he is ill.
