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    ‘Beyond Utopia’ Review: Exit Strategies

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    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 UtopiaRated PG-13. Descriptions of torture and brutality. In English and Korean, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 55 minutes. In theaters. More

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      in Television

      Song Hae, Beloved South Korean TV Host, Dies at 95

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      Born in what is now North Korea, he was known for his cheeky grin and folksy wisecracks as the host of South Korea’s weekly “National Singing Contest” for more than three decades.SEOUL — Song Hae, who fled North Korea as a young man during the Korean War, became a beloved television personality in South Korea and was recognized by the Guinness World Records as the world’s “oldest TV music talent show host,” died at his home in Seoul on Wednesday. He was 95.His death was confirmed by Lee Gi-nam, the producer of a 2020 documentary on Mr. Song’s life, which charted a tumultuous course that reflected South Korea’s modern history through war, division, abject poverty and a meteoric rise. No cause of death was given.A jovial Everyman figure known for his cheeky grin and folksy wisecracks, Mr. Song became a household name in South Korea when he took over in 1988 as the host of the weekly “National Singing Contest,” a town-by-town competition that mixes down-home musical talent, farcical costumes, poignant life stories and comedic episodes.Mr. Song was recognized by Guinness World Records in April as the “oldest TV music talent show host.”Jung Yeon-Je/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesHis talent show, which he announced with his booming voice piped into households in South Korea every Sunday, ran for more than three decades. Mr. Song traveled to every corner of South Korea and to the Korean diaspora in places like Japan and China, and even to Paraguay, Los Angeles and Long Island, N.Y. He continued as host until the show went on hiatus during the coronavirus pandemic, and officially remained at its helm at the time of his death.While the show was on hold, his health seemed to deteriorate without his weekly outlet, according to Jero Yun, director of the documentary, “Song Hae 1927.”“It was, in some ways, the driving force of his life, meeting people from all walks of life through the program and exchanging life stories,” Mr. Yun said. “People would always recognize him, crowd around him and want to talk to him.” Referring to the K-pop megagroup, Mr. Yun added, “He might as well have been BTS.”Mr. Song was posthumously awarded a presidential medal for his contributions to South Korea’s culture, the president’s office announced on Wednesday. He was entered into Guinness World Records in April.Mr. Song was born Song Bok-hee on April 27, 1927, under Japanese occupation in what is now Hwanghae Province in North Korea. His father was an innkeeper. A few months after the Korean War broke out in 1950, he left his home at 23 to avoid being drafted to fight for the North, and made his way south. He eventually boarded a U.N. tank landing ship, not knowing where it was headed. Staring out at the water, he would later say, he renamed himself Hae, for the character meaning sea.He left behind his mother and a younger sister in North Korea, and well into his 90s, any mention of them would reduce him to tears.After the ship took him to the South Korean city of Busan, on the peninsula’s southern coast, he served as a signalman in the South’s army. He had said in interviews that he was one of the soldiers who tapped out the Morse code in July 1953 transmitting the message that there was a cease-fire halting the war.After his discharge from the army, he peddled tofu in impoverished postwar South Korea before joining a traveling musical theater troupe, in which he sang and performed in variety shows. He eventually became a radio host, anchoring a traffic call-in show that catered to cab and bus drivers. It aired an occasional segment in which the drivers would dial in for a sing-off.In 1952, Mr. Song married Suk Ok-ee, the sister of a fellow soldier he had served with in the war, and they had three children. After 63 years of marriage, Mr. Song and his wife held the wedding ceremony they never had, having originally married in the poverty and turmoil of their youth. She died in 2018.He is survived by two daughters, two granddaughters and a grandson. In 1986, his 21-year-old son was killed in a motorcycle accident, and Mr. Song could not bear to continue working on his radio traffic show. Around the same time, he was tapped to host the singing contest for the national broadcaster, KBS.With Mr. Song at its center, the show quickly became a national pastime, particularly among older residents and those in rural communities — groups that the program spotlighted and that were seldom seen on television.Grandmothers break-danced and rapped; grandfathers crooned sexy K-pop numbers. Countless young children charmed the host onstage, some of whom went on to become stars. Once, a beekeeper covered in bees played the harmonica while a panicked Mr. Song cried out, “There’s one in my pants!”Mr. Song never fulfilled his lifelong dream of revisiting his hometown in North Korea, but because of his show, he came tantalizingly close.A memorial to Mr. Song at a hospital in Seoul on Wednesday.Korea Pool/Yonhap via APIn 2003, during a period of détente between the Koreas, the show filmed an episode in the North Korean capital, Pyongyang. The songs were carefully screened by the North’s censors to include only propagandist ones, and the atmosphere was so tense that Mr. Song never broached the possibility of visiting his hometown, Chaeryong, even though it was just 50 miles south of the capital, he said in interviews.At one point during the trip, he recalled, he got drunk with his North Korean minder, who told him that he wouldn’t recognize his hometown anyway because everything had changed in the intervening five decades and most of the people had moved away.In a 2015 biography of Mr. Song, Oh Min-seok, a poet and professor of English literature, wrote: “As a refugee who fled south during the Korean War, there is a loneliness that is wedged in his heart like a knot. He has no problem connecting with anyone, from a 3-year-old to a 115-year-old, from a country woman to a college professor, from a shopkeeper to a C.E.O. That’s because inside, he’s always pining for people.”In South Korea, the show’s contestants and adoring fans became his family. Women — including the show’s oldest contestant, a 115-year-old — took to calling him “oppa,” or older brother, Mr. Song later recalled.“Who else in the world can claim to have as many younger sisters as I do?” he said. “I’m happy because of the people who boost me, applaud me, comfort me.” More

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      in Music

      North Korea Executes People for Watching K-Pop, Rights Group Says

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      At least seven people have been put to death in the past decade for watching or distributing K-pop videos, as the North cracks down on what its leader calls a “vicious cancer.”SEOUL — North Korea has publicly executed at least seven people in the past decade for watching or distributing K-pop videos from South Korea, as it cracks down on what its leader, Kim Jong-un, calls a “vicious cancer,” according to a human rights report released on Wednesday.​The group, ​ Transitional Justice Working Group, which is based in Seoul, interviewed 683 North Korean defectors since 2015 to help map places in the North where people were ​killed and buried​ in state-sanctioned public executions​. In its latest report, the group said it had documented 23 such executions under Mr. Kim’s government.Since taking power a decade ago, Mr. Kim has attacked South Korean entertainment — songs, movies and TV dramas — which, he says, corrupts North Koreans’ minds. Under a law adopted last December, those who distribute South Korean entertainment can face the death penalty. One tactic of Mr. Kim’s clampdown has been to create an atmosphere of terror by publicly executing people found guilty of watching or circulating the banned content.It remains impossible to find out the true scale of public executions in the isolated totalitarian state. But Transitional Justice Working Group focused on executions that have taken place since Mr. Kim ascended and on those that have occurred in Hyesan, a North Korean city and a major trading hub on the border with China.The North Korean town of Hyesan, near the border with China, is a gateway to smuggle in South Korean entertainment stored on USB sticks.Damir Sagolj/ReutersThousands of North Korean defectors to South Korea have lived in or have passed through Hyesan. The city of 200,000 people is the main gateway for outside information, including South Korean entertainment stored on computer memory sticks and bootlegged across the border from China. As such, Hyesan has become a focus in Mr. Kim’s efforts to stop the infiltration of K-pop.Of the seven executions for watching or distributing South Korean videos, all but one took place in Hyesan, the report says. The six in Hyesan occurred between 2012 and 2014. Citizens were mobilized to watch the grisly scenes, where officials called the condemned social evil before they each were put to death by a total of nine shots fired by three soldiers.“The families of those being executed were often forced to watch the execution,” the report said.Mr. Kim rules North Korea with the help of a personality cult and a state propaganda machine that controls nearly every aspect of life in the North. All radios and television sets are set to receive government broadcasts only. People are blocked from using the global internet. But some North Koreans still manage to secretly watch South Korea’s movies and TV dramas. As the North’s economy has floundered amid the pandemic and international sanctions, defections to the South have continued.North Korean defectors filling bottles with rice and USB sticks to toss into the sea toward their former homeland.Ed Jones/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe number of defectors arriving in South Korea has dropped sharply in recent years, however, so gathering fresh information on the North has become harder. Mr. Kim’s government has also further tightened border restrictions amid the pandemic.But Daily NK, a Seoul-based website that gathers news from clandestine sources in the North, reported that a villager and an army officer were publicly executed this year in towns deeper inland for distributing or possessing South Korean entertainment.And a few secretly filmed video clippings of public trials and executions have been smuggled out of North Korea. In footage shown on the South Korean TV station Channel A last year, a North Korean student was brought before a huge throng of people, including fellow students, and was condemned for possessing a USB stick that held “a movie and 75 songs from South Korea.”Shin Eun-ha told Channel A of a public execution she and her classmates had been made to watch from the front row when she was in second grade in North Korea. “The prisoner could hardly walk and had to be dragged out,” she said, adding, “I was so terrified that I could not dare look at a soldier in uniform for six months afterward.”Though Mr. Kim has described South Korean entertainment as a “vicious cancer,” North Koreans were able to watch the popular girl band Red Velvet and other South Korean stars who flew to Pyongyang in 2018 for two performances.Korea Pool via APMr. Kim has at times tried to appear more flexible toward outside culture​, allowing state television ​to play the theme song from “Rocky” and to show ​Mickey and Minnie Mouse characters ​onstage. He even invited South Korean K-pop stars to the capital, Pyongyang, in 2018, when he was engaged in summit diplomacy with President Moon Jae-in of South Korea. But at home, he has also escalated his crackdown on K-pop, especially after his talks with President Donald J. Trump collapsed in 2019 and the North’s economy has deteriorated in recent years.Amid growing international scrutiny of North Korea’s human rights abuses, the government appears to have taken steps to prevent information about its public executions from being leaked to the outside world.It no longer appears to execute prisoners at market places, moving the sites farther away from the border with China or town centers, and inspecting spectators more closely to prevent them from filming the executions, Transitional Justice Working Group said.Mr. Kim has also tried to create a public image as a benevolent leader by occasionally pardoning people condemned to death, especially when the size of an assembled crowd at a public trial is large, the group said.But K-pop seems to be an enemy that Mr. Kim cannot ignore.North Korea repeatedly lashes out against what it describes as an invasion of “anti-socialist and nonsocialist” influences from the South. It cracks down on South Korean slang spreading among its youths, including “oppa,” which became internationally known through Psy’s “Gangnam Style” song and video.The North’s state media has also warned that if left unchecked, K-pop’s influence would make North Korea “crumble like a damp wall.” More