By John Corrado

★★★½ (out of 4)

Director Madeleine Gavin’s documentary Beyond Utopia offers a compelling glimpse inside North Korea, through the eyes of those who risk their lives trying to escape the country.

The real pull of Gavin’s film is the secret, handheld footage shot by defectors themselves, showing us the perilous journey that they must undergo to escape this dictatorial regime (an opening title card tells us there are no recreations, and everything that we see is the real deal).

Because crossing over into South Korea is virtually impossible, the journey out involves travelling along the border with China and over the Changbai mountains, with security cameras and armed guards in patrol towers who are paid to shoot anyone trying to escape.

If defectors are caught in China, they will either be sent back to be tortured or are at high risk of being trafficked or sold into the Chinese sex trade, which means that they must make their way to one of the neighbouring countries. Among the subjects are a multigenerational family who are trying to make their way to Thailand, and Soyeon Lee, a mother who is trying to help her teenaged son escape with help from Pastor Seungeun Kim, who is forced to work with the sleazy “brokers” who profit off of helping people cross the border. Gavin also interviews author Lee Hyeon-Seo, who wrote the book The Girl with Seven Names, and now speaks publicly about growing up in North Korea before defecting.

Through these interviews and secretly recorded footage, Beyond Utopia is able to pull back the curtain on this authoritarian communist dictatorship that really exists without parallel in the modern world. The film also offers an encapsulated history of North Korea, including how Kim Jong Un has starved his own people in order to fund a WMD program that is being used to prop up his own dictatorship and scare the world into compliance.

What emerges is a fascinating portrait of the bizarre reality of living in North Korea, a place ruled by a government that purposefully keeps its citizens in the dark, and residents are given no knowledge of the outside world. Children are taught in school to blindly hate the “American-Bastards,” and that the rest of the world lives in poverty and squalor without strong leadership.

The citizens are trained to revere their own leader as a deity, with Bibles being banned and the story of Christ’s divine birth having been co-opted as the origin story of their leader Kim Jong Il. It’s a society built on compliance. Any dissidents (including those who commit the “crime” of watching South Korean movies) are made an example of and shot down with anti-aircraft missiles in public executions that school children are forced to watch. This fear of being killed not only forces people to obey, but also encourages them to spy on and report their neighbours.

The film is often eye-opening and shocking, not least of which for the depressing realization that such a place could even exist in the modern world. The power of Beyond Utopia lies in how it shows the human yearning for freedom, both how far people will go to obtain it, and how once you realize what it means to be free, you can never go back. A necessary watch.

A scene from BEYOND UTOPIA, Courtesy of Mongrel Media.

Beyond Utopia opens exclusively in limited release in Toronto on November 3rd, and will expand to more cities in the coming weeks. It’s being distributed in Canada by Mongrel Media.