But part of the story “Beyond Utopia” tells is that the citizens of North Korea don’t fully understand how oppressed they are. Usually, when refugees flee an oppressive regime, they know what they’re leaving behind they can taste the freedom they’re searching for. But to make it, the defectors must embark on a treacherous journey, traveling on foot through jungles and over mountains, with the aid of brokers who do it for the money and have no interest in whether the desperate people who are paying them make it to their destination. ![]() Thailand is not Communist if you get there, you’re free. The promised land is Thailand, on the other side of Laos. All of them are Communist countries that, if you’re apprehended, will return you to North Korea. Today, if you want to escape, your only choice is to cross the Yula River into China, then make it through Vietnam and Laos. ![]() The DMZ that separates North and South Korea is rigged with two million land mines. He emerges as a figure of benevolent fearlessness, and a master strategist, as he arranges the escape plan that guides the Roh family. In the last 10 years, he has helped 1,000 people to escape, risking his own safety. The documentary’s central figure is Pastor Seungeun Kim, a gentle smiling South Korean Christian who himself defected from North Korea years ago. But the film also chronicles, with footage shot on a cell phone, the attempt by five members of a family to leave this bad dream of a nation, and their escape story has a scary, suck-in-your-breath suspense. It peeks behind the Potemkin-village façade that, for too long, is all that we’ve really been able to see of North Korea. That last phrase is, of course, a loaded one, and “Beyond Utopia” makes the reference explicit by claiming that North Korea is a cult state of such relentless terror that the only country it’s comparable to is Nazi Germany.Īs a profile of the glum dystopia of North Korea (one state newspaper, one state TV channel, apartments without elevators where the tenants burn wood, hole-in-the-ground outhouses, human waste gathered by the government to fertilize farms, citizens encouraged to spy on other citizens), “Beyond Utopia” has a quotidian terror. They’re “banished,” by being deposited in the wilderness, or incarcerated in one of the gulags, otherwise known as a concentration camp. We hear about what happens to the ones who receive the worst sentences. ![]() We see North Koreans who’ve gotten in trouble with the regime - which one man did just for tearing off a piece of newspaper with Kim Jong-un’s image on it so that he could roll a cigarette - locked in interrogation rooms, getting savagely beaten and tortured. The filmmaker got ahold of forbidden footage that was smuggled out of the country, and in that footage we see citizens lined up to watch a public execution then we see the execution.
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