A visceral, inside look into attempts to escape North Korea through the eyes of refugee defectors and guidance of a badass pastor named Seungeun Kim. We break down the US Documentary Audience Award winner BEYOND UTOPIA by Madeleine Gavin in this episode.
Sundance 2023 Section: U.S. Documentary Competition
Distribution: Cinematic Release on November 3, 2023, Premium Video on Demand on November 28, 2023, PBS Independent Lens on January 9, 2024, & Hulu on January 9, 2024
From Sundance’s website: A suspenseful look at the lengths people will go to gain freedom, Beyond Utopia follows various individuals as they attempt to flee North Korea, one of the most oppressive places on Earth, a land they grew up believing was a paradise. At the film’s core are a mother desperate to reunite with the child she was forced to leave behind, a family of five — including small children and an elderly grandmother — embarking on a treacherous journey across the Yalu River and into the hostile mountains of China, and a man of God on a mission to help these desperate souls. Leaving their homeland is fraught with danger — severe punishment if caught and possibly even execution — as well as potential exploitation by unscrupulous brokers. Family members who remain behind also may face retribution. Yet these individuals are driven to take the risk.
Gripping, visceral, and urgent, Madeleine Gavin’s film embeds the viewer with these family members as they attempt their perilous escape, palpably conveying life-or-death stakes. The result is a singular, illuminating, and unforgettable experience.
Music Credit: spacedust by airtone
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:13.501] Kent Bye: Hello, my name is Kent Bye. And I'm Wonder Bright. And welcome to Story All the Way Down, where we're continuing our coverage of looking at the documentaries at Sundance 2023. In today's episode, we're going to be looking at Beyond Utopia by Madeline Gavin. So this is in the US documentary competition, and it was actually a bit of a reveal as to what exactly this documentary was about. I remember last year at Sundance 2022, there was a film about Navalny, which was a surprise announcement. And there were concerns around the Russian security forces and Putin. Similarly, this year, there was two films that had this kind of surprise announcement. There was a film called Justice about Brett Kavanaugh. So they had a bunch of investigative journalism about some of the transgressions of Brett Kavanaugh, who's now a Supreme Court justice here in the United States. And then Beyond Utopia was another one that the description was just a log line that said, hidden camera footage augments this perilous high stakes journey as we embed with families attempting to escape oppression, ultimately revealing a world most of us have never seen. Now at that time, that was very vague and didn't have much information. And the film ends up being about these refugees escaping North Korea. Eric Cohen from Andy Wire was reporting that there was different security concerns from the Sundance Festival. So this is a film that is quite an adventure and shows a huge amount of courage for a main protagonist named Pastor Kim, who is working with different brokers across all these different countries from China to people embedded within North Korea who are smuggling in cell phones to Vietnam and Laos and also Thailand. So in order to coordinate this escape has to basically go through all these different hoops and It's a thrilling, scary, terrifying film, but also has people who were defectors from North Korea giving information. They have hidden camera footage around the different conditions of North Korea. So it's a real fascinating look and peek into the ways in which an authoritarian state is able to create a bubble that is preventing all outside media from coming in. But yet, despite that, people are still able to, through different underground networks, find a way to communicate with each other and, in some cases, escape or not escape. And so, yeah, I'd love to hear some of your initial thoughts of Beyond Utopia.
[00:02:37.403] Wonder Bright: Well, as a fairly longtime K-drama fan, I have long been very curious about North Korea. The way it's handled in K-dramas typically is either a sort of like crossed lovers look like in Crash Landing on You, or they're handling a defector in court. We saw that in an episode of Extraordinary Attorney Woo. And it's just sort of piqued my curiosity. So the experience of watching this film where the veil is lifted and there's actual footage of the people living in North Korea being shot surreptitiously, the memory cards of which have been smuggled out of the country at extreme peril by the smugglers because the penalty is death. These are forbidden images from a forbidden country. And the filmmakers contrast this beautifully with propaganda films that the current leader of North Korea, Kim Jong-un, puts out and his father and his grandfather before him. He's third in the lineage of dictators that have had the run of North Korea since September 1948. So the propaganda shots are in stark contrast to the surreptitious footage. And it really depicts a fulsome picture that is simultaneously hard to watch and also riveting because it's scored throughout with this story of this family, an entire family, the grandmother who's 80, And then the youngest daughters who are very young. They're definitely not older than five. And yet, despite how young they are, they know enough to be quiet when their parents say be quiet. Like they are clearly all of them in fear for their lives at every step along the way. This film was riveting. It is as gripping and edge of your seat as any action thriller adventure film that you're going to see this year. And it's a testimony to the human spirit and to the capacity to be of service through Pastor Kim, who imperils his own life. is severely injured after having helped over a thousand defectors escape from North Korea. He has injured his body multiple times, and yet he still continues on this mission. He married a woman who is a North Korean defector. And so the effort is deeply personal for him. And the way that he tells his story and the way that it is braided through with his wife's story, And the dangers that he goes through in telling this particular iteration of the story with this particular family and another family that he's also attempting to help is clear why this film won an audience award. It's just well deserved. They brought all of us with them on that journey. And I know more now about North Korea from a personal firsthand perspective through the eyes of this family. than I did before, and it feels very personal to me because of the way that it was told.
[00:06:08.955] Kent Bye: Yeah, I really appreciated how they were able to give a little bit of a recap to the history of Korea, North Korea, with the Japanese imperialism and that got split, and then the Korean War, and then 21 countries from the United Nations collaborated with this three-year war. Five million people were killed, half of them were citizens, And they give a statistic that if you take the total amount of bombs dropped in World War II and divide that by three, that's how many bombs the United States had dropped on North Korea. So, you get this sense of this antagonism between North Korea and the United States and the way in which that you don't just say Americans, you call them American bastards according to North Korea defectors. So, they're able to give that context, but also the leadership there is just on this path of wanting to attain these nuclear weapons to be this global player whilst their citizens are suffering and dying and not really being properly nourished. And I think this film benefits from not only the footage that they were able to smuggle out, and I think they mentioned that they have these miniaturized cameras that were able to be hidden in different ways. And the memory cards are the things that's being smuggled back out. And so we get some on the ground footage of what's happening inside of North Korea. But I think the thing that I really appreciated was the different defectors that were contextualizing what was happening there, the ways in which that there's this whole level of brainwashing that happens. The brainwashing meaning that, like we were talking about in Om, the cult at the end of the world earlier, how you create a filter bubble. Well, North Korea is like the ultimate filter bubble of anything that exists in the entire world, because there's literally no outside media that's allowed. There's like one TV station, one radio station, and it's all the state propaganda. But at the heart, there's a couple of stories that are being told here. From the synopsis, it says, at the core, there's a mother who's desperate to reunite with her child. She was forced to leave behind. And then also a family of five, including small children and elderly grandmother embarking on a treacherous journey. that they go through all these different countries. And I think the heart of the film is Pastor Kim, who you get more information as to why he's doing this, but he's really putting his life on the line. And through the defection of his wife, he learned how to operate all these different networks and brokers and At the end of the day, you have these brokers who are either going to engage in a long-term relationship of consistent connection or they're going to potentially get more money for turning people in. He has to navigate this weird dynamic where at the end of the day, the brokers don't care about the people that they're helping to rescue. they just want to maximize the money that they're able to get from this transaction. It's very transactional, but yet Pastor Kim, you can tell he's putting his own life on the line and actually like embedding himself into these rescue efforts in a way that was quite surprising and that he would do that that many times and the fact that he's been able to help over a thousand people escape from North Korea is absolutely remarkable and incredible. And yeah, like you said, this film does deserve the audience award because it's just a thrilling ride, but you also just are able to bear witness to the human rights violations that are happening. And you see the degree to which the people who are living in North Korea are stepping outside of this filter bubble for the first time, trying to understand What is the nature of truth? What is the nature of reality? Has their entire life been essentially like the Truman Show where they're in this bubble and everything that's happening on set is kind of constructed and manufactured and a bit of a lie? And for people to kind of have to unpack all that brainwashing that they've been going through their entire lives and reckon with Why does it have to be this way? I think as a film, it is able to capture the intrigue of this severe extreme nature of what's happening in North Korea and the fact that the Sundance Film Festival felt like it's still such a sensitive issue that could potentially open up the festival to some sort of cyber attack from North Korea, that they felt like they needed to keep aspects of this only be revealed at the last moment. So yeah, I was really blown away by the piece. Yeah, I couldn't take my eyes off what was going to happen next.
[00:10:38.994] Wonder Bright: Yeah, it's like an obvious two thumbs up from us. We're not reviewing anything that we don't feel that way about. And this one is an easy one to recommend to people because I think anybody can find themselves in this story. It's an extremely compelling arc. I agree with you regarding Pastor Kim. What a remarkable human being he is. And it's not just the altruistic acts that he's committing. It's the way he's doing it, the way that you described his ability to work with these brokers long term and yet doing it from such a spirit and service oriented space. He's occupying this tension between extreme pragmatism, because that's what it's going to take to get a thousand plus people out of North Korea. you have to have a realistic apprehension of circumstances and be able to navigate yourself from moment to moment, paying a lot of attention. And yet at the same time, that pragmatism is matched by a clear and resolute idealism that he has married his heart to. And it's just so compelling. You know, I want some of what he's having. And I'm so grateful to the filmmakers for giving us like just this little dose of it. And picking up on what you were saying about watching the family sort of like become aware that they'd been fed lies, like the first instance where you really see that occurring is when they managed to make it to a country where they're staying in a location where there's actually running water and toilets. And they are really overwhelmed by the experience of trying to learn how to use these things and orient themselves in relationship to them. Because not only do they not have them back home, but they've been taught to believe that their country is the best country and they have the best of everything. So that all these other countries are suffering under much worse conditions than they are. So they're waking up to a reality that may be physically beneficial, but mentally it's going to cause them a certain amount of distress and extreme dissonance. And the person who experiences that the most, of course, is the one who's been living under that regime the longest. So this is the grandmother. And I just saw my grandmother and my mother in her and my future self in 30 years. And I just... just watching her come to terms with these things is a pretty extraordinary story in itself.
[00:13:30.932] Kent Bye: Yeah, and I just wanted to also call out that these are people who are, by their choice, exiling themselves from their own home, and so they have connections and relationships and families, but yet they have these policies within North Korea that if you have anybody in your family that have defected, then you're put on this list, so you're essentially going to be exiled and killed within the country. And so they realized that this was going to happen and it forced their hand to go ahead. And if they were going to be banished from their lives already, why not take that extra risk and actually escape from the country? So you have the fourth house being the home and the 12th house being this exile. You have this 12th house experience within this film of people on the run being refugees, escaping the oppression and authoritarian ways of their home country. So yeah, I don't know if you have any other like 12th house themes that you saw kind of emerging from a whole country as a metaphor of a prison, in a way that people are really having so many different human rights violations and their home is a prison, but also in the process of escaping their prison, they're in a 12th house experience in a way that they're leaving the comforts of their home.
[00:14:48.206] Wonder Bright: Yes, the Twelfth House themes were like everywhere at the heart of this film. And if we think about what we learned in watching The Longest Goodbye about the people who are leaving the planet and the Twelfth House nature of those themes, and what the psychologist was determining was the most important thing for exiles is to experience being tethered. People who have to leave and go a long, long way away need to be tethered to the place that they are leaving. And within the longest goodbye, obviously the hope is that they'll return. And I think one of the most heartbreaking themes about Beyond Utopia is the fact that of course these people will never return. And they're lucky if they never have to return. And yet they remain tethered to North Korea. It reminds me of stories of people who've lost a limb and they still feel the limb even though they've lost it. And Hyunse Lee is a defector who has her own TED talk and a book which I'm now very keen to read. And she's interviewed in Beyond Utopia. And she speaks really movingly of what that process is like as a defector from North Korea. and as a long-term exile, to never be able to return to the place that you had to leave but that you will forever miss. And for some reason now I'm thinking about the grandmother realizing that running water is a possibility and that she's been lied to her whole life. and thinking about the consternation and dissonance that's going to occur for her for missing a place where that was never a possibility. I don't know that it's possible to put those feelings into words. And I'm just grateful that I have an experience of it secondhand just from watching this film.
[00:16:52.437] Kent Bye: Yeah, I think as they were on their journey of escaping, they mentioned that they're going to miss different things, different people. And I think that's natural and it's normal. And as we learn about the whole constructed reality that's happening in North Korea, a thing that was really striking to me as well is the fact that all external religions are banned in part because there's certain aspects of the Bible that are just taken whole cloth as part of the mythology of their leaders to kind of taking these almost like beat by beat the story of Christ and replicating it as the story of the founding of North Korea itself. And so you have plagiarism of these religious texts that then requires all those texts to be banned and then punishable by death, essentially. So you have this constructed reality that people have been a part of, and it's been not able to be penetrated to break down and to get information that would allow people that are within that bubble to fully realize the extent to which that they're being diluted by their dear leader who they have to keep his picture up on the wall and keep it dusted, and they have these invasive checks from the government to see if it's been dusted to a certain degree. Yeah, just to see all the different ways in which the authoritarian power structures are operating in there. It's kind of like a unique Disneyland of oppression. I don't know of other way to describe the type of constructed realities that are in such a sinister authoritarian rule and the types of human rights violations that the population has to undergo. Yeah, it's really this bittersweet level of bearing witness because it is such a heart wrenching to know the degree to which that these people's fundamental rights to dignity and what it means to live a life that has freedom and liberty, but it is so much under the constrained rule and for what end to what purpose? I think it's It's got these deeper politically driven motives, but at some point it becomes almost like an ego trip or something of these dictators and leaders. It's a type of psychology that I think I would need to watch more about the actual instruments of that oppression. what these people are taught and just the deprogramming process that these defectors go through. It sounds like there's entire processes that places that are receiving North Korean refugees have in order to help to deprogram them and help them to integrate into society again. And one of my final thoughts before we get into the bearing witness is just the sadness around the way in which that the COVID lockdowns were starting to potentially disrupt this type of processes that Pastor Kim has had just with the more restrictive ways in which that these countries have shut down their borders or put down these different COVID protocols has made it even more difficult for people within North Korea to defect. This was a bit of a pre-pandemic adventure that these people go on, but also the filmmakers who are there right along everybody else to film this journey that they go on. I don't know if you have any thoughts
[00:20:09.569] Wonder Bright: Yeah, I do. I just want to pick up on what you said there about the propaganda machine of North Korea. And yeah, there is a way in which it does seem to disnify oppression and state dictatorship. And give a shout out to the book, A Kim Jong Il Production, which is a nonfiction book, which is about the current leader, Kim Jong Un's father, Kim Jong-il who was an avid film watcher and hoarded black market films that he had smuggled into the country from all over the world so that he had a private screening room where he could watch these films. This was before he took over from his father. He spent his whole youth watching and absorbing story. And when he did become a dictator, He actually had the premier South Korean filmmaker and his wife kidnapped from South Korea and brought into North Korea so that they could make propaganda films for him. And the story of how that occurs and how these two people eventually escaped, is extraordinary and really helps to unpack the dexterity and acuity with which the dictatorship in North Korea is run. Their mastery over propaganda and image and how to utilize it to serve the narration of their choice. is profound. And as we can see on the face of this grandmother, the impact and effects of it are deeply disturbing, terrifying, frankly. They're truly horrific.
[00:21:54.246] Kent Bye: Yeah, and as we wrap up, I guess the thing that I want to bear witness to in this film is Pastor Kim and his courage and dedication and passion and helping to be of service of these people who are trying to escape into a better life. And the degree to which that he's willing to put his own life on the line to do that is just incredible. And what he's been able to create with this film, which, you know, there's a part of me that's a little worried that a little too much information may be shared in terms of that he's doing this in a way that has been so successful, but hoping that it's perhaps for a larger purpose of just making people more aware of the conditions that are happening there in North Korea and what it takes to escape that situation. But yeah, Pastor Kim was a real inspiration for me as I was watching this film. I was just really blown away with the level of courage and amount of bravery he has in order to continue to be involved in doing this work.
[00:22:56.734] Wonder Bright: Yeah. And I want to bear witness to the grandmother and what it took for her to undertake this journey as the matriarch of a family. When I think about this film, I think it's gonna be her face that I remember most. Both the bravery in the actions that she took and the alarm in the wake of the dawning realizations of where she was beginning to find herself and what it might mean.
[00:23:40.238] Kent Bye: Yeah, well, that was Beyond Utopia by Madeline Gavin. It was a part of the Sundance 2022 U.S. Documentary Competition. It actually did take home the Audience Award. And as of right now, I don't see any distribution that's listed there, but hopefully it'll become available. And yeah, you've been listening to the Story All the Way Down podcast by Kent Bye and Wonder Bright. And if you'd like to get more information about the podcast, you can go to storyallthewaydown.com and find ways that you can support the podcast. And yeah, help spread the word, tell your friends, and I guess we'll see you in the theaters.
