Yodok Stories

How does one use the documentary format to convey the brutality perpetrated in modern concentration camps where tens of thousands of North Korean political prisoners languish and die? The important Polish director Andrzej Fidyk found an original and enormously impressive way of combining documentary film testimony about crimes against humanity with a disquieting work of art. He convinced the theatre director Jung Sung San (who escaped from the Yodok concentration camp across the border to South Korea in 1994) to stage a musical faithfully recounting the shocking practices used in the concentration camp. At the same time the authors based their work on the recollections of several people who survived internment in concentration camps and managed to escape to South Korea. They have all been political victims of the dictatorship even though some of them started out as camp guards. Eventually, however, they also began to feel uncomfortable... The chilling dance choreography, chorales and musical arias interlaced with very frank descriptions by eye witnesses of the suffering endured in North Korean concentration camps bear witness in an artistically moving way to the crimes of one of the harshest dictatorships in the world.