‘Beyond Utopia’ Review: A Staggering Look at the Nightmare of North Korea, and Some Brave Souls Who Try to Escape It

North Korea is a spot of fearsome fascination. It’s essentially the most brutal regime on earth, led by a dynastic dictator, Kim Jong-un, who has proved to be much more ruthless and obsessive about nuclear weapons than his father, Kim Jong-il. All of us have a sure imaginative and prescient of North Korea, a rustic sealed like a jail, lower off from the remainder of the world by know-how (or the absence of it). You may say it exists as a form of ghost state, a totalitarian hellhole in lockdown. However while you watch Madeleine Gavin’s staggering documentary “Past Utopia,” which is about what actually goes on in North Korea, and a couple of handful of determined souls who try to defect from it, you see North Korea — the complete nightmare of the place — as by no means earlier than.

The filmmaker acquired ahold of forbidden footage that was smuggled in another country, and in that footage we see residents lined as much as watch a public execution; then we see the execution. We see North Koreans who’ve gotten in bother with the regime — which one man did only for tearing off a bit of newspaper with Kim Jong-un’s picture on it in order that he might roll a cigarette — locked in interrogation rooms, getting savagely overwhelmed and tortured. We hear about what occurs to those who obtain the worst sentences. They’re “banished,” by being deposited within the wilderness, or incarcerated in one of many gulags, in any other case often known as a focus camp. That final phrase is, after all, a loaded one, and “Past Utopia” makes the reference express by claiming that North Korea is a cult state of such relentless terror that the one nation it’s similar to is Nazi Germany.

As a profile of the glum dystopia of North Korea (one state newspaper, one state TV channel, flats with out elevators the place the tenants burn wooden, hole-in-the-ground outhouses, human waste gathered by the federal government to fertilize farms, residents inspired to spy on different residents), “Past Utopia” has a quotidian terror. It peeks behind the Potemkin-village façade that, for too lengthy, is all that we’ve actually been capable of see of North Korea. However the movie additionally chronicles, with footage shot on a cellphone, the try by 5 members of a household to depart this dangerous dream of a nation, and their escape story has a scary, suck-in-your-breath suspense.

The documentary’s central determine is Pastor Seungeun Kim, a delicate smiling South Korean Christian who himself defected from North Korea years in the past. Within the final 10 years, he has helped 1,000 individuals to flee, risking his personal security. He emerges as a determine of benevolent fearlessness, and a grasp strategist, as he arranges the escape plan that guides the Roh household.

The DMZ that separates North and South Korea is rigged with two million land mines. At this time, if you wish to escape, your solely alternative is to cross the Yula River into China, then make it by means of Vietnam and Laos. All of them are Communist nations that, for those who’re apprehended, will return you to North Korea. The promised land is Thailand, on the opposite aspect of Laos. Thailand just isn’t Communist; for those who get there, you’re free. However to make it, the defectors should embark on a treacherous journey, touring on foot by means of jungles and over mountains, with the help of brokers who do it for the cash and have little interest in whether or not the determined people who find themselves paying them make it to their vacation spot.

Often, when refugees flee an oppressive regime, they know what they’re abandoning; they will style the liberty they’re looking for. However a part of the story “Past Utopia” tells is that the residents of North Korea don’t totally perceive how oppressed they’re. They will’t; they’ve by no means seen every other method of being. In that sense, aside from Nazi Germany, the nation that North Korea most resembles is Mao’s China in the course of the madness of the Cultural Revolution and the Nice Leap Ahead. Tens of hundreds of thousands of individuals died in China from famine, as a result of Mao’s disastrously unhinged financial insurance policies. Within the aftermath, partly to cowl all that up, China turned the primary Nationwide Propaganda Media State, subjecting its huge populace to a every day brainwashing, with Mao held up as a dwelling deity.

The North Korean regime, in some ways a wicked outgrowth of Maoism, goes even additional. Because the movie exhibits us, it has taken its made-up theology from the Bible, with Kim Jong-un portrayed as a Christ determine, and we see footage of the nice mass stadium exhibitions that the residents, together with 1000’s of schoolchildren, rehearse for a 12 months at a time — shows that appear like the opening ceremony of the Olympics staged on a mile-wide digital billboard through which each LED gentle is a choreographed human being. All of this loony-tunes spectacle is supposed to rejoice the “utopia” of North Korea, with the surface world, particularly America, portrayed as such a demonic place that the one phrase used to check with somebody within the U.S. is “American-bastard.”

The joyless suppression of life in North Korea prompts a minimum of some residents to suspect that a greater life should lay on the opposite aspect. The household of defectors in “Past Utopia” are like that; they’re odd individuals who have put themselves on a shifting mission. We additionally comply with the saga of Soyeon Lee, who defected from North Korea and is now making an attempt to get her 17-year-old son to do the identical. The Roh members of the family (mom, father, two younger daughters, 80-year-old grandma) are guided by Pastor Kim, who arranges to satisfy up with them in China; they make the journey step by perilous step. Lee’s son isn’t so fortunate. He’s detained by the authorities, tortured, and despatched to a gulag. We see {a photograph} of a doleful good-looking excessive schooler, and it’s a surreal horror to think about what has occurred to him. At moments, his mom’s torment is nearly an excessive amount of to bear.

North Korea wasn’t all the time as horrific as it’s now. Earlier than the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia helped to subsidize the nation, and for years it was stronger economically than China, held up in some quarters as a shining instance of how Communism might “work.” However the nation was gutted by the Soviet downfall. The famine that occurred killed 3 million residents, and Kim Jong-il commenced the technique of utilizing nuclear weapons as each a menace and a diversionary tactic, a method of getting the West to neglect concerning the nation’s human-rights violations. It labored. The weapons, now with the mobster-autocrat Kim Jong-un in cost, get all the eye. After all, the West is true to deal with any nuclear menace with sober warning. However what we’ve forgotten about, for too lengthy, is the North Korean individuals. For years, their distress has existed below a blackout. “Past Utopia” appears to be like behind the wall and shines a light-weight.