New Documentary ‘Beyond Utopia’ Shows Reality of Living and Escaping North Korea

A North Korean flag as pictured on 18 July 18, 2007. Peter Parks/AFP via Getty Images

The Sundance-winning documentary “Beyond Utopia,” which aims to show the unthinkable conditions for those living inside North Korea and the harrowing escapes of its defectors, has another daunting mission: To provide those living within the totalitarian state an awakening of the outside world.

That’s because North Koreans remain living largely in obscurity, with very limited photos and videos of their plight, which are readily available to those outside their world.

“We need to get the truth of the country out so you really see what life is like in North Korea—real life—not just what we see with the missiles, but for us to see what it’s really like,” director Madeleine Gavin told The Epoch Times about her film, which this week was nominated for a Producers Guild of America Award (PGA).

“And we need to get the information in so they (North Koreans) can see what life is like outside and start to realize they deserve more,” Ms. Gavin said.

“You can’t ask for something if you don’t know you deserve it,” she added. “They need to see what they’re entitled to to start to build the seeds of resistance.”

Living in a Virtual Prison

Hyeonseo Lee, a woman who fled North Korea with her family in the 1990s and documented their perilous journey in her best-selling 2016 memoir ”The Girl With Seven Names,” is featured in the film.

She sums up life living in North Korea’s completely censored and controlled society in a single poignant sentence.

“We were captured in a huge virtual prison,” said Ms. Lee in the film.

“Many foreigners wonder how North Koreans can live like human robots. Why they’re not questioning the regime; why they’re not overthrowing the regime? But I believe every person, if born in North Korea, would be exactly like us because we didn’t know another life existed besides the one we had,” she explains in the film.

Besides her story, the film follows the Rohs, a North Korean family of five, attempting to escape the regime’s stronghold.

It also follows Soyeon Lee, a North Korean refugee mother determined to reunite with her son, who remains in North Korea.

Ms. Gavin strived to provide the world with a real-life glimpse into life inside North Korea, which has remained largely shrouded in secrecy since the two Koreas were divided following World War II.

Ordinary North Koreans don’t hold the freedoms that most people in democratic nations enjoy. As the U.N. report put it, North Korean human rights violations are “unparalleled” in the modern world.

Pastor Helps Defectors

In “Beyond Utopia,” the hero is South Korean pastor Sung-eun Kim, who devotes his life to what he believes is his God-given purpose of aiding North Koreans in their quest for freedom.

For defectors, leaving North Korea is not as simple as climbing a fence—or even surviving the trek across the river that separates the country from China. Because the regime has cozy relationships with neighboring nations China, Laos, and Vietnam (where hunting and capturing defectors is a profitable business in which people caught are often sold into human trafficking), escapees must journey on a secret underground railroad through all three nations before hopefully finding refuge in Thailand and ultimately landing in South Korea. Mr. Kim assists in these journeys.

“Pastor Kim is first and foremost a pastor, and he made a commitment to his God 23 years ago that he would devote his life to this,” Ms. Gavin said in a recent interview with Yahoo Entertainment. “That he would not only devote his life to this, but that he would go along the journeys with the people he was trying to help escape. … He has had multiple surgeries on various parts of his body. He is in constant pain.”

Mr. Kim has helped more than 1,000 North Koreans defect over the past decade. He once broke his neck helping some cross a river on the border of China and fell off a cliff in Laos. The pastor no longer goes to China because he’s been warned that North Korea is aware of his activity helping defectors and that he could be kidnapped into the country. He is now afraid for his life in all of these countries—Laos, Vietnam, and Cambodia—because of their relationships with North Korea.

“He’s had a huge impact,” Ms. Gavin, who worked on the film from 2019 to 2022, told The Epoch Times. “Without Pastor Kim, we would never have been able to get the material we got.”

Hidden Camera Footage

During the film-making process, Ms. Gavin found propaganda and shocking online and hidden camera footage from harrowing escapes of would-be defectors trying desperately to leave.

She also went down a months-long wormhole of dark web research on the country and its notoriously oppressive living conditions under the dictatorship of Kim Jung Un. She used different VPNs (virtual private networks, which allow users to mask their IP data and avoid firewalls and other blockers) and searched in multiple languages.

For more than 70 years, the people of North Korea have been suffering unthinkable things under the Kim dynasty. The North Korean regime’s human rights violations are well-documented, especially in the nearly 400 pages of the United Nations Commission of Inquiry report released in 2014, which detailed the regime’s crimes against humanity.

There are an estimated 80,000 to 120,000 individuals held inside North Korea’s modern-day gulags; women and girls are regularly subject to various forms of rape and sexual violence and food deprivation is the norm.

And despite being one of the poorest countries in the world, it maintains one of the largest militaries and devotes significant resources to its illicit nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs.

Like Palestine under Hamas, Kim Jung Un’s regime and its use of its nuclear and missile weapons programs have taken center stage over the lives of the people.

The official film poster for ‘Beyond Utopia’. Ideal Partners/Human Rights Foundation

Filmmakers Went On Faith

For Ms. Gavin, making the movie involved a process like she’s never experienced before because of dealing with a country like North Korea and following an escape in real-time with people who couldn’t possibly give full consent to the filming.

“So it was huge—my producers and financiers all had to be on board that we’re taking a risk and that we may not be able to use this,” said Ms. Gavin about the filming process and the footage obtained through it.

The film will likely be in contention for Best Documentary at March’s Academy Awards.

Ms. Gavin also noted what an especially critical time it is now because of China’s policy of repatriating North Koreans.

During the pandemic, Ms. Gavin said 2,650 North Koreans were arrested in China and not sent back because North Korea stopped accepting them due to COVID-19. But about a month ago, they repatriated 650 of them, with approximately 2,000 left.

“A lot have been accused of being religious, so the worst fate possible awaits them in North Korea,” explained Ms. Gavin, noting the current protesting that’s going on related to this.

Overall, she hopes that showing the reality of life inside North Korea sparks change and that getting information about the outside world into North Korea spurs its citizens to know that they deserve more.

“That exchange of information is huge. And so our film is pushing for that,” Ms. Gavin told Yahoo Entertainment.

“And then, like I said, we’ve got to be talking about the people. There are 26 million people and they have been suffering for more than 70 years. And it’s outrageous that we don’t advocate for them every chance that we can.”