This engrossing documentary, which follows a family’s flight from North Korea, plays like a horror film, except the horrors are real.
The journey of the Roh family to escape from North Korea is the subject of the documentary “Beyond Utopia.” North Korea is a land of hunger, torture and indoctrination. It’s crushed under a cult of personality so punitive that citizens can be imprisoned if inspectors find any dust on the household portrait of supreme leader Kim Jong Un. Yet an 80-year-old grandmother who’s one of the central figures in the documentary “Beyond Utopia” is convinced it’s the best country on earth.
The Rohs’ struggles are all the more gripping because they’re seen in authentic images. The film includes a few short animated sections — which don’t portray the Rohs — but there are no reenactments. Gavin and her crew followed the family on part of their voyage; other episodes are depicted with video from cellphones or hidden cameras. Though often low-definition, the video is immediate and absorbing, and edited skillfully.
The Rohs decided to cross the Yalu River to China — the direct route across the demilitarized zone between North and South is too dangerous to attempt — because other family members had already fled. Under a new decree, relatives of people who had defected during the last three years were to be imprisoned in Soviet-style gulags or banished without supplies to a wilderness in the country’s far north.
What the Rohs find on their travels — elevators, indoor plumbing, flat-screen TVs and Americans who are friendly rather than murderous — astounds them. It turns out that a humble safe house in Laos looks a lot more like utopia than any place they’d seen in North Korea.Two other narrative strands extend through the film. One is the testimony of defector Hyeonseo Lee, who’s become a polished public critic of her former homeland.
Pastor Kim is motivated by Christian faith and personal history. Most of the other people portrayed in the film are impelled by fear, deprivation and love of family. But the underground railroad that runs circuitously between the two Koreas runs on something even more basic: greed. Black-market money fuels the preacher’s operation, and its smugglers are no more to be trusted than the coyotes who lead migrants across the Mexico-U.S. border.
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