Escaping North Korea: ‘Beyond Utopia’ documents one path to freedom

“Beyond Utopia” follows a family who has escaped what some describe as a maximum security prison: North Korea.

After the Ro family crosses a river into China, they furtively travel to Thailand via Vietnam and Laos. If caught, they’ll be sent back. At one point, the six refugees enter a Vietnamese rainforest at night. To avoid being spotted, they’re careful not to shine their flashlights upward. The group includes two young girls, who take turns piggybacking on their father. The children’s 80-year-old grandmother stoically staggers up a slick mountainside. 

“When people see Grandma going through the jungle, they can’t believe [it],” says the documentary’s director, Madeleine Gavin, in a video call. “Her life has been one of endurance.”

“Beyond Utopia” focuses on an underground railroad funded by a South Korean church. Its pastor, Seungeun Kim, travels to Vietnam and Laos to personally aid refugees, even though he’s been warned that he could be kidnapped and turned over to North Korea. He has liberated over 1,000 North Koreans since 2000. The movie, appearing on 700 screens in special Fathom Events screenings on Oct. 23 and 24, followed by a regular release on Nov. 3, examines the lengths people will go to in order to attain freedom. 

“This film definitely stopped me in my tracks when I watched it,” says Meira Blaustein, documentary programmer and co-founder of the Woodstock Film Festival in New York, where the movie unanimously won the jury award for best documentary. “It’s heartbreaking but also inspiring. ... The people in it are all in pursuit of liberty and democracy. I am so impressed by this filmmaker and what she has taken upon herself with this film. It could not have been easy to make.”

A few years ago, Ms. Gavin was offered an opportunity to adapt Hyeonseo Lee’s bestselling memoir, “The Girl With Seven Names: A North Korean Defector’s Story,” into a movie. When the director began research about North Korea, she came across videos that brokers in Mr. Kim’s underground railroad had filmed inside the secretive country. They compelled Ms. Gavin to broaden the scope of her movie, which also includes Ms. Lee.

“When I found this hidden camera footage that was being smuggled out of the country, I realized how much we didn’t know,” she says. “There were 26 million people who we had never had an opportunity to hear from.”

Sue Mi Terry, a former CIA analyst who appears in the documentary, tells the Monitor that it’s difficult for Westerners to understand the most isolated country on the planet. The dynastic regime tries to prevent information from getting in or out. The movie doesn’t linger on brutalities such as the torture of dissidents, but it doesn’t shy away from them either. As a counterweight to the grim scenes, the film’s center features the humanity of Mr. Kim and the family.

“He is one person. They are one family. But in that, there is the hope of what can come,” says Ms. Gavin.

Years ago, Mr. Kim was working as a missionary in China when he fell in love with a defector from North Korea. The snag? He had to figure out how to smuggle his now-wife into South Korea. He parlayed the knowledge he gained into founding the underground railroad with a route that goes through China.

“The Bible [tells us] we need to help the people in the lowest place and hungry and the poor,” he says via a translator on a video call. “As I pray, I actually go rescue those people in need.”

The documentary tells another story in parallel to the Ro family’s odyssey. Defector Soyeon Lee, now living in South Korea, is trying to extract her teenage son from the communist country in the north. 

“‘Beyond Utopia’ shows the reality of human rights violence that is happening in the 21st century,” she says via a translator on a video call. She adds that Kim Jong Un’s regime is very conscious of how the world perceives it. “There was a video that Pastor Kim actually smuggled out from North Korea of a public execution. So when this video was getting widely [seen] in the world, actually North Korea stopped public execution.” 

The regime is more careful now to conceal its brutal punishments, she says. “Beyond Utopia” also illustrates how the government controls its populace through brainwashing. For example, children are taught that Americans are cold-blooded killers. When the grandmother in the Ro family met Ms. Gavin and her film crew at a safe house, she was confounded that they were so nice to her. 

“She was grappling with her feelings in meeting us and getting to know us versus what she’s believed and known for 80-plus years,” says the director. 

During layovers at safe houses in Vietnam and Laos, the Ro family gapes at a running shower inside a bathroom. In their North Korean village, they’d always hauled water from a river and poured it into a caldron at home. When the two young girls taste chocolate and popcorn for the first time, their eyes dance with delight. Defectors who make it across the Thai border spend months living in a facility where they unlearn North Korean propaganda and are taught how to live in the West.

“It’s not just an easy thing to suddenly feel free,” says Ms. Gavin. “Freedom allows you to get to know yourself and others and connect. That is a process for a lot of North Korean defectors.”

The director and the participants in the documentary believe that the increased flow of information from outside North Korea’s borders will ultimately be the regime’s undoing.

“That’s why there is edict out right now saying ... ‘You have to be careful of the southern wind,’” says Dr. Terry, the former CIA analyst. “I’m not saying this is something that’s going to happen in a decade, but I remain hopeful that one day we can free North Koreans and there will be a unified Korea.”