19/03/2013 - German director Marc Wiese's Camp 14 – Total Control Zone and Norwegian director Yvonne Thomassen's The Family Portrait are honoured by the jury and audience

German director Marc Wiese’s Camp 14 – Total Control Zone, about Shin Dong-Huyk’s escape from one of North Korea’s brutal labour camps, won the top prize at the 12^th Eurodok festival in Oslo, which ended Sunday (March 17).

“A strong and personal testimony,” said the jury of the winner, which provides “a unique and brutalglimpse of a reality that we wish were a stagein human history, giving the the wordto both victims and perpetrators.” Dong-Huyk was born and grew up in Camp 14, until he managed to escape at the age of 23.

Organised by Oslo’s Cinemateket and the Norwegian Film Institute, the five-day festival “with an unusually big span between “feelgood” and “feelbad” entries,” per festival director Jan Langlo, reached 3,000 admissions to a programme of 34 recent European documentaries, including 14 local productions.

The jury gave an honorary mention to Finnish director Mika Ronkainen’s Finnish Blood, Swedish Heart, about “identity, family, migration, upbringing – and music,” while the Audience Prize went to Norwegian director Yvonne Thomassen’s The Family Portrait.

Produced by Trude Refsahl, Thomassen described her film as “a personal documentary about my 94-year-old grandmother, my search for my own identity and my efforts to fulfil her last wish: bringing the whole family together.”

The festival was concluded by UK director Bart Layton’s The Imposter [+see also:
trailer
film profile], also selected Documentary of the Month at the Cinemateket. Film tells the story of 13-year-old Nicholas Barley from Texas, who disappears in 1994; three years later a teenager is found in a phone booth in Spain, claiming he was kidnapped by US soldiers to be their sex slave. His family, however, is not so sure.