Beyond Utopia

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The Reel Review

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Seung-eun Kim, a South Korean pastor and human rights activist, has helped more than 1000 defectors flee North Korea since the year 2000. This documentary chronicles one of his most daring flights to freedom ever captured on film – involving a family of five that fled North Korea after learning two of them were about to be sent to a labor camp. The film also profiles the heartbreaking efforts of a prior defector to get her son out of North Korea.

Beyond Utopia plays out like a pulse pounding spy thriller. It is at its best when it showcases the harrowing journey of Pastor Kim and the family and the shocking, smuggled video director Madeleine Gavin obtained from the dark web of the bleak life inside North Korea. It is horrifying. Children are forced to witness public executions, starvation is rampant, and citizens are each required to donate a certain amount of human excrement to fertilize fields. (Locking up outhouses to prevent theft is a big deal.) Additionally, the government routinely rounds up family members of defectors, sending them to labor camps where they are never heard from again.

Defectors face dangers at every turn. They must first avoid being shot by North Korean border guards or drowning while crossing the turbulent river separating North Korea and China at night. Then they must avoid being captured by Chinese touts who traffic the captured young women into sex work or even being spotted by ordinary Chinese citizens, who are paid a bounty for turning in defectors. For those who survive that, there is a days-long car ride, first to Vietnam, then Laos, and then across the Mekong River by boat into Thailand where asylum is assured.

The only real weak spot in the documentary is a dry history lesson about the evolution of North Korea, which detracts a bit from the more riveting real-time drama. But seeing the shock on family members’ faces as they learn the harsh mind-blowing truth about their former country is both moving and unforgettable.

REEL FACTS

• The pace of defections from North Korea has dropped significantly since the COVID pandemic, to just a few dozen per year, compared to a 2009 high of 2900 defectors. Most defectors enter into China’s northeastern provinces. If caught they are sent back to North Korea, where they are imprisoned and/or killed.

• The annual North Korean Mass Games, the world’s largest gymnastics event which features tens of thousands of participants, many of them children, has not been held since 2020.

• Beyond Utopia won the Audience Award at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival and has made the Oscar shortlist of films in consideration for Best Documentary Feature.