German filmmaker Marc Wiese spent two difficult weeks interviewing Shin Dong-hyuk, an escapee from North Korean prison camp for his new documentary, "Camp 14: Total Control Zone," the Guardian reports, in which the 23-year old recalls the horrifying details of life inside a camp where death was the only means of escape.
Dong-hyuk was born inside the camp, living a bleak life in which torture, murder and rape were daily realities for the prisoners. He is the only person known to be born in a total control camp, and recently gave testimony about his experiences in front of a UN commission, as part of an investigation into the atrocities of North Korea's prison crimps.
In the weeks Wiese spent in Seoul, interviewing Dong-hyuk for two hours a day, the men had to take a number of breaks, as speaking about his life was far from for the camp escapee. At one point, when Dong-hyuk spoke about being tortured with fire at the age of 14, he vanished for two to three days without a word.
Because he felt uncomfortable talking to Wiese in his studio, the filmmaker had "to build him a setting where he felt comfortable," a Spartan living environment consisting of bedding on the floor and not much else around, similar to the conditions he lived with his mother back at the camp. Despite the special setting, Wiese told the Guardian "it was complicated for him" to participate in the interview at all.
At the beginning of the interview, Wiese asked Dong-hyuk to recall a memory from when he was 4, hoping to start off on a light note, but things immediately took a grim turn.
"So he told me, 'I have a memory; it was a public execution,'" Wiese explained. "I said, 'Did your mother talk to you about that? Did she try to help you?' He looked at me and was shaking his head, and he said, 'No. For what? It was happening every week.' And just for me, personally, I said, 'Shin, what did your mother teach you?' and he said, 'Only one thing: how to survive.'"
In Dong-hyuk's biography, "Escape from Camp 14: One Man’s Remarkable Odyssey From North Korea to Freedom in the West," former Washington Post journalist Blaine Harden writes of life inside the camp, where adults and children alike were beaten daily, people were regularly executed, raped and tortured, and starving prisoners resorted to eating rats, insects and even particles from feces in order to survive.
In the new documentary, the line between victim and perpetrator becomes disturbingly blurred, the Guardian reports.
Dong-hyuk lived with his mother for most of his life, though he did not receive any maternal love from her. Because breaching any camp regulation was punished by death, he had to tell guards when he heard his mother and brother plotting to escape, as if he didn't, he would likely have been killed as well. He told Wiese that when he and his father were forced to watch their public execution, "he felt nothing."
In 2005, Dong-hyuk became friends with a political prisoner named Park, who told him about life outside of the camps. The two plotted their escape, but Park did not survive the trek through the electric wire, and although Dong-hyuk sustained injuries, he managed to get out and survive by stealing food in local towns before eventually making his way across the border to China.
Wiese hopes that the new film will help Dong-hyuk continue to improve. When the two went to the premiere the film at a festival in Hague, Wiese recalled, "He went on stage and said he's very happy, and then suddenly he began to cry like hell. I mean, an Asian person crying in public is a total no-go. You never do that. So, he was crying, and then he said into the microphone, 'The chance that my father is living is 1% or less. But if he's still alive, and so are all the other people, it's happening right now, in this moment, and that makes me terribly sad.' So, if you go down into deeper levels in his personality, he's still totally traumatized."
Though he has much work to do, Wiese doubts that Dong-hyuk can ever truly be "like you and me."
"Camp 14: Total Control Zone" is set for release in the U.K. on Oct. 4.
