Rating: PG-13 | Runtime: 115 minutes
Release Date: October 27th, 2023 (UK) / November 3rd, 2023 (USA)
Studio: Dogwoof / Fathom Events / Roadside Attractions
Director(s): Madeleine Gavin

Is it just better if you don’t know?

The wildest revelation while watching Madeleine Gavin’s documentary Beyond Utopia is that the North Koreans defecting on-screen aren’t doing so because they were deprogrammed. They simply understand that the severe punishments wrought upon those citizens with relations to prior defectors meant they weren’t going to be able to survive if they stayed. Ask the little girls trekking through the jungle in the dead of night about Kim Jong-Un and they are still quick to smile before declaring him the most important person in the world.

That’s how deep this indoctrination goes. When people talk about The Bible being forbidden at the start, I assumed they meant because it and Christianity are from the western world. So, I was shocked to learn the real reason was that Kim Il-Sung had plagiarized it so thoroughly in order to make himself into God and Kim Jong-Il into Jesus that he couldn’t afford the people questioning how the culture of many “American-Bastards” was so similar to their own. Everything about North Korean life is meticulously curated for absolute control.

This education courtesy of a handful of defectors speaking about their experiences was my favorite part of the film. Not because the harrowing escape by the Roh Family with help from South Korean Pastor Seungeun Kim or attempts by So-yeon Lee to pay for her seventeen-year-old son to join her in freedom aren’t affecting. They are. I just think the horrors of our world have numbed me to the point of seeing their struggles as familiar. There are too many oppressed people dealing with this situation and it’s become hard to stop myself from allowing the fatigue of believing it’s an unfixable problem to set in.

Learning more about the history and the experiences is thus a fresher and more engaging bit for my brain to latch onto. Rather than open myself up to caring for these unfortunate souls only to discover they won’t make it (the odds are less than a coin flip), I can absorb their trajectories with a similar objectivity—using their examples as a teaching tool rather than merely a means for an emotional reaction. Add some levity like a complete non sequitur about poop and it’s easy to stay invested intellectually just in case things don’t end up okay.

It’s therefore a tough movie to watch. But an important one to make certain you do. Because even if you too have come to the point of numbness for these crazy escapes (the Rohs must travel hundreds of miles through three or four countries without getting caught just to set foot on non-communist soil), the necessity of bearing witness never goes away. It’s one thing to approach innocent lives with hardened hearts so as not to continuously lose faith when they are inevitably lost. It’s another to willfully pretend that they don’t exist.

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The Roh family trekking through the jungle in BEYOND UTOPIA. Courtesy of Roadside Attractions.