Beyond Utopia
Composite Score: 86.73
Featuring: Hyeonseo Lee, Sung-eun Kim, So-yeon Lee, Sue Mi Terry, Barabara Demick, Jung Gwang-Il, Jean H. Lee, Jinhae Roh, Jinpyeong Roh, Yonggil Roh, Yeongbok Woo, and Esther Park
Director: Madeleine Gavin
Genres: Documentary, Biography, History
MPAA Rating: PG-13 for thematic material, violent content, and disturbing images
Box Office: $110,196 worldwide
My take on Watching This Film:
Beyond Utopia is Madeleine Gavin’s documentary about defectors from North Korea and the system of people who work to help them escape to countries that won’t extradite them back to their home country once they have left it. The film focuses primarily on Pastor Sung-eun Kim, director of the Caleb Project, an “underground railroad” that has helped rescue more than 1000 defectors from North Korea since 2000, as he works to bring the Roh family from the China-North Korea border to safety in Thailand (and eventually South Korea). It also features an examination of a defector, So-yeon Lee, as she tries to get her 17-year-old son out of North Korea from South Korea and the increasing difficulties faced by the families of those trying to escape from the authoritarian regime. The final bit of window dressing for the film comes in the form of a combined history and culture lesson on the nation of North Korea from “experts” and other defectors that paint the nation as we understand it to be – the brainwashed dystopia led by a maniacal dictator. While the journey of Pastor Kim and the Rohs makes for some truly gripping cinema, and So-yeon Lee’s struggles to free her son provide some emotional weight to the documentary, the almost propagandistic anti-North Korea press run that comprises the rest of the film really took me out of it. We already know that North Korea is not a great place to live, so I think that if we’re going to critique it, we should do so without setting it up as some kind of straw man next to the “luxury” of South Korea. This is especially true, given what we’ve been seeing out of South Korea in terms of cultural progression (or lack thereof) in the past few months and years. Quality of life certainly improves from North Korea to South Korea, but that’s also true in China, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, and Thailand. Just about anywhere in the world is going to have, on average, a higher quality of life than someone experiencing political suppression in North Korea (which should also be noted). I do think the documentary does a good job of not villainizing North Koreans, but it doesn’t bring enough nuance to its conversation about the problems of South Korea as an alternative to truly make the profound statement that it’s trying to make. Instead, it ends up feeling a bit ham-fisted and borderline gaslighting in its portrayal of this good vs. evil personified in South vs. North Korea. If it was just a documentary about Pastor Kim, the Rohs, and Ms. Lee, it would be an infinitely better film that actually carries the impact that this film wanted to have. Their stories still make it worth catching if that’s something you’re interested in learning more about, and it is an impressive documentary on those fronts, mostly deserving of its accolades. However, I can’t overlook how one-sided all of its arguments were and the sense of propaganda that I got from so much of what I was watching, and I’d encourage you to go in with some sense of caution. You can currently stream this film on Hulu if you’d like to check it out any time soon.
