Scandinavian premiere:
Yodok Stories
An estimated 200,000 North Koreans are thought to be imprisoned today in North Korean concentration camps. One of the most feared of these goes by the name of "Yodok" where few so-called “class enemies” survive. Since North Korea is the world’ most isolated country, there is much scanty information about the situation in the camps. Only former inmates and guards who have fled to other countries can tell of the conditions in these camps which were built according to Soviet and Nazi models. The renowned director Andrzej Fidyk, multiple prize-winning documentary filmmaker and member of the European Film Academy, bases this documentary on these refugees’ accounts. But he does so with the help of the stage.
One of Fidyk’s previous films brought attention to the huge well-choreographed spectacles arranged every year in North Korea in honour of its leader. 50,000 youths perform perfectly synchronized human slide shows about "The Great Leader" in gigantic arenas. In Yodok Stories Fidyk decides to stage a performance with the help of a North Korean choreographer in exile which tells the story of Yodok.
Yodok Stories is a film about working on the musical about Yodok. Here we meet people who have both been imprisoned in and worked in North Korean concentration camps and who have succeeded in fleeing to the neighbouring country of South Korea. Eye-witness accounts are weaved together with scenes from the musical, painting a terrifying pitch-dark picture of what is happening in North Korea, and how the world around so easily turns its back when circumstances get too troublesome.
