Beyond Utopia: Doc About North Korea Escapees Scary for Viewers and Protagonists

By Chris Knight

Rating: A-

There are two parallel documentaries happening in Madeleine Gavin’s excellent film Beyond Utopia. In one, we watch as Pastor Kim Seungeun, a redoubtable Christian missionary based in Seoul, helps ordinary people flee the hell that is the world’s only Communist Confucian hereditary dynasty: North Korea.

In the other, we’re treated to images and stories from said People’s Republic. This is crazy stuff. North Korea is a nation that appropriated the Christ narrative for its Dear Leader, then banned all Bibles so no one would figure out the government-sanctioned plagiarism.

It’s a country where you’re liable to be punished if you don’t have a picture of Kim Jong-un in your house, or if a surprise government inspection finds it dusty. One escapee, now living in South Korea, tells how the government collects all human waste to use as fertilizer, making poo theft a common and dastardly crime.

I’m honestly not sure which of these threads I found more fascinating.

On the one hand, the fleeing-refugees narrative felt a little same-y, since I’d just seen two similarly fraught stories of migrants trying to cross from Belarus into Poland — the documentary Walls and the truth-inspired drama Green Border, both at the recent Toronto International Film Festival — not to mention several recent docs about African refugees trying to reach Italy or Greece by boat.

But such tales never get stale, and the ones in Beyond Utopia are almost beyond belief. The “defectors” must cross a river from North Korea into China, then traverse a mountain range on foot before trekking through Vietnam and Laos, knowing that if they’re discovered they’ll be sent back to North Korea, to torture and possible death.

Once they reach Thailand, Pastor Kim tells them, they can finally allow themselves to be arrested. In fact, they should welcome it, since they’ll now be treated as refugees and not escapees and will most likely wind up in South Korea — a stone’s throw from where they started their escape, as it happens.

The fleeing family comprises three generations, with the most pitiable moments featuring a grandmother fighting seven decades of brainwashing and indoctrination.

There are scenes of her wondering if she and her fellow citizens are stupid for not making North Korea more prosperous. Wondering if she could have done more to make Kim Jong-un even a little happier. And finally wondering if — maybe — her government has been lying to her for her entire life.

It’s a painful moment of realization, for her and the audience alike.

Beyond Utopia. Directed by Madeleine Gavin. Starring Kim Seungeun, Kim Jong-un. Opens at Toronto’s Scotiabank Theatre November 3; in Ottawa and Edmonton November 12; in Vancouver November 17; in Halifax November 22; and throughout the fall in other cities.