This film, directed by Madeleine Gavin, documents the experiences of defectors from North Korea.
“Beyond Utopia,” a documentary on defectors from North Korea, begins by pre-empting the inevitable questions about how it was made. “The film contains no recreations,” the opening titles explain. The footage, we are told, was shot by the filmmakers, the subjects and operatives in the underground network that helped those subjects escape.
That access alone gives the movie an intense interest. Directed by the longtime editor Madeleine Gavin, “Beyond Utopia” pivots around Seungeun Kim, a pastor in South Korea who has spent more than two decades assisting North Koreans who want to escape the totalitarian regime. The precarious course to safety generally runs through multiple countries.
There are two main rescue missions chronicled in the film. One involves Soyeon Lee, a past defector who lives in South Korea and is trying to retrieve her son from the North. At the time this documentary was shot, the boy was 17, and she had not seen him in 10 years. Does he want to defect? The mother believes so, although communication is difficult, and there is no choice but to trust middlemen.
The other mission involves the Ro family — a mother, father, two children and a grandmother who have, at the time Pastor Kim gets word of them, successfully crossed the heavily guarded Yalu River, which separates North Korea from China. But they need the pastor’s network to shuttle them through Southeast Asia. Until they reach Thailand, they will be at constant risk of being returned. Some of the people who cross, Pastor Kim says, wind up being sold for sex trafficking or organ harvesting.
The family’s journey forms the backbone of the film, and not only because “Beyond Utopia” has some footage of them navigating the jungle by night. (Who could even keep a camera going under those circumstances?) There is also a chance to see them adapt to an unfamiliar — and, to them, practically unbelievable — environment, and to see their reactions as they realize what they learned in North Korea was wrong. “I feel like our country must become more developed,” says the grandmother, once they have reached Vietnam. “I mean I know how intelligent our Marshal Kim Jong-un is, so are our people just not smart?”
“Beyond Utopia” fills out these stories with the history of North Korea, a country that Sue Mi Terry, a former C.I.A. analyst and a producer on the film, describes as “the only communist Confucian hereditary dynasty in the world.” Defectors like the activist Hyeonseo Lee fill in the picture on what life is like there, and how propaganda could convince the North Korean populace that they are living in a utopia.
The engrossing, often tense proceedings are slightly marred by a pushy score. All the same, being able to experience the escape alongside these subjects greatly distinguishes this documentary.
Beyond Utopia
Rated PG-13. Descriptions of torture and brutality. In English and Korean, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 55 minutes. In theaters.
Source: Movies - nytimes.com
