Yodok Stories (Yodok Stories)

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Yodok Stories
Original title	Yodok Stories
Alternate title	Yodok - A Place to Make a Good Person through Re-Education
Type	Documentaries
Director	Andrzej Fidyk
Short summary	Today, more than 200.000 men, women and children are locked up in North Korea's concentration camps. Systematic torture, starvation and murder is what faces the inmates. Few survive many years in the camps, but the population is kept stable by a steady influx of new persons considered to be 'class enemies'. A small group of people have managed to flee from the camps to a new life in the prosperous South Korea. Some of them gather and decide to make an extraordinary and controversial musical about their experiences in the Yodok concentration camp. Despite death treats and many obstacles the musical becomes a tour de force for this ensemble of refugees and for them a possibility opens to talk about their experiences and inspire others to protest the existence of the camps.
Summary	North Korea is a country where human rights are non-existent. George Orwell's horror vision 1984 pales compared to Kim Jung Il's merciless, totalitarian regime. Dictator Kim Jung Il holds all of North Korea's inhabitants as hostages; they are observed, brainwashed and threatened into total submission. Presumed political adversaries, intellectuals, disloyal people; in short all dissidents disappear, and today more than 200.000 men, women and children are locked up in North Korea's concentration camps. They are systematically starved and tortured. They think no one in the world knows about them. Very few survive the atrocities. The film Yodok Story follows a 36 year old North Korean defector, Jung Sung San, who has managed to escape through China to South Korea. He is one out of nine people who have escaped the camps and managed to flee to “safety” in Seoul. Here he organizes a controversial theatre play about his experiences as prisoner in the concentration camp Yodok in North Korea. He inspires eight other refugees to recreate the past, and together they work to develop a musical about the concentration camps. The film follows the characters through this difficult process. There are many who would like to stop them, and Jung receives several death threats. The film leads us close to the refugees, we participate in their private lives, and we listen to their dramatic stories. Their lives in Seoul are affected by financial difficulties and hostile South Koreans with a negative view on North Korea after years of propaganda. Yodok Story is their only chance to get their story told.
Screenplay	Andrzej Fidyk, Torstein Grude
D.O.P	Tore Vollan, Torstein Grude
Editor	Jan Mikolaj Mironowicz
Composer	Kyung Chan Cha, Bartlomiej Wozniak
Sound	Bartlomiej Wozniak, Michal Wróblewski
Producer	Torstein Grude
Production company	Piraya Film as \| Lervigsveien 22 \| NO-4016 Stavanger \| Tel (+47) 51 11 63 36 \| Fax (+47) 51 11 63 37
Country of origin	Norway
Release date (national)	2008-10
Technical information
Format	35mm
Screen ratio	1:1,85
Colour	Colour
Sound System	Dolby SR
Length in min's	75
No. of reels	4
International sales	Kudos Family \| www.kudosfamily.com mail (at) kudosfamily.com
Distributor (Norway only)	Kudos Family \| www.kudosfamily.com mail (at) kudosfamily.com
Festival participation	2008 Planet Doc Review, Warsaw Screened as Work in progress 2008 Bergen International Film Festival 2008 International Documentary Festival Amsterdam 2009 Festival du Film et Forum International sur les Droits Humains, Geneva 2009 One World Film Festival, Prague 2009 Amnesty International Film Festival Movies That Matters, The Netherlands 2009 One World Film Festival, Romania 2009 African, Asian and Latin American Film Festival, Milano 2009 Belfast Film Festival 2009 Movies That Matter - Amnesty International Film Festival 2009 Beldocs, Beograd, Serbia 2009 Den norske dokumentarfilmfestivalen, Volda 2009 Tribeca Film Festival 2009 Doxa Documentary Film Festival, Vancouver 2009 Senza Frontieri - Without Borders Film Festival, Rome 2009 Jerusalem International Film Festival 2009 Holocaust and Genocide International Films, Melbourne, Australia 2009 Global Peace Film Festival, Orlando, USA 2009 Nordisk Panorama 5 Cities Film Festival, Reykjavik 2009 Oakland Int. Film Festival, USA 2009 Nagoya Refugee Film Festival, Japan 2009 Document 7 - Int'l Human Rights Film Festival Glasgow 2009 DMZ Docs, South Korea 2009 People in Peril, Bratislava 2009 Verzio Human Rights Documentary Film Festival, Budapest 2009 Sheffield Docu Fest, UK 2009 Århud filmfestival, Denmark 2009 Black Nights Film Festival, Estonia 2009 Plus Camerimage, Poland 2010 Victoria Film Festival, Canada 2010 Thessaloniki International Documentary Film Festival 2010 Polish Film Festival, Los Angeles, USA
Prizes received	2008 Planet Doc Review, Warsaw: Youth Jury Award 2008 Bergen International Film Festival: Youth Jury's Documentary Award 2009 Jerusalem International Film Festival: In the Spirit of Freedom Award
URL	http://www.yodokfilm.com

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Director biography:
Director Andrzej Fidyk closeup Andrzej Fidyk has directed more than 40 documentary films for Polish and British television, and has been awarded a number of prizes for his work. Many regard Fidyk as one of Poland's best documentary film directors, and his filmography includes favourites like Battu's Bioscope (aka Mobile Cinema of Dreams, 1998) and The Parade (1989). He is now working on two films for Piraya Film; Yodok Story and Belarusian Waltz. Fidyk is originally educated as an economist, majoring in international trade at Warsaw University.