The text below is taken from the review by Anton Bitel:
"I sit in the room without thoughts and without really doing anything. This quietude helps me kill time. I don’t really want to think about anything."
The speaker is Shin Donghyuk, one of very few people to have escaped a North Korean death camp, making the tale that he has lived to tell of crucial importance to the South Korean government and to human-rights organisations – and of considerable curiosity value for the world’s press.
German documentarian Marc Wiese (Das Mädchen und das Foto, Kanun – The Law of Honour) turns his subject’s quietude into a filmmaking principle. Much as Shin narrates his experiences in calm, measured tones, marking his continuing anguish not with on-camera breakdowns or emotive gestures but rather with long silences and awkward expressions of discomfort, so too Camp 14: Total Control Zone adopts a hushed approach, letting Shin’s words speak for themselves and allowing their full impact to hit in the breathing spaces of his drawn-out pauses.