![]() ![]() The Rohs - a husband and wife, their two small children, and an elderly grandmother - had been wandering for five days on Changbai Mountain just across the vigorously patrolled Yalu River that separates China and North Korea, when a farmer’s smartphone video of the desperate-looking family made its way to pastor Seungeun Kim in Seoul. Documentaries with life-or-death stakes, not to mention wider resonance in our increasingly unsettled geopolitical world, don’t get much more nerve-racking or heartbreaking than “Beyond Utopia.” At the same time, the film is inspiring about the lengths people will go to for a better life. Guiding their efforts is a dedicated pastor in South Korea with extensive contacts in the Underground Railroad for defectors, plus his own scars from years of this hazardous work.īetween the in-the-moment tension and glimpses at the reality inside a hidden regime (footage was covertly shot with smuggled-in cameras), the film makes for a blistering, wrenching counterpoint to any narrative of North Korea that foregrounds the bizarre at the expense of the citizens suffering. It puts us right in the heart of a perilous attempt in 2019 by a North Korean family of five, and separately a teenage boy with a mother in Seoul, to flee Kim Jong Un’s oppressive rule. But only North Korea’s brand of isolated, propaganda-fueled tyranny seems to inspire reportage steeped in the weird - thanks in part to the dangerous whims of its current leader and the coddling by America’s former president.Įnter documentarian Madeleine Gavin’s urgent dispatch “Beyond Utopia,” a reminder that people’s lives there are continuously at risk. The world’s bad-actor states are well-known from the worrying news they regularly produce.
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