In agonising real-time, Madeleine Gavin’s new film tracks two attempts by North Koreans to flee the world’s most repressive state
Madeleine Gavin thinks her new film is “kind of a miracle”. That’s not some idle boast, it’s just an acknowledgement that Beyond Utopia – by any measure, one of the year’s most gripping and timely films – would not have happened without the extraordinary bravery and trust of a handful of people.
Gavin’s story tracks, in agonising real-time, two attempts by North Koreans to flee the world’s most repressive state. The first, a teenage boy trying to reach his mum, Soyeon, anxiously awaiting news of his progress from Seoul. Second, the Ro family – a mum, dad, two kids and a grandma in her eighties – caught on camera as they make the mind-boggling 6,000-mile trip to South Korea through China, Vietnam, Laos and Thailand, menaced at every step by the threat of forced repatriation or worse. It’s the first such account brought to the screen.
“Looking back it almost takes my breath away that we were able to document this at all,” says the director over Zoom, days after the film’s South Korean premiere in Busan. “We were groping around in the darkness, really; we never knew what was coming up in the next day, the next hour, the next minute. It was a heart-stopping experience to try and document something that is so life and death, with so many unknowns and variables.”
The “miracle” of its making was enabled in large part by Sengeun Kim, a pastor in charge of a Seoul-based network helping North Koreans to defect. Gavin met Kim through her research for an earlier draft of the film, based on activist Hyeonseo Lee’s account of her own defection from North Korea some 25 years ago. She had been gripped by the memoir, but felt the film needed an “experiential component” to reflect the situation as it exists on the ground now. She got it through Kim, who agreed to help make the film after months of discussions helped earned his trust. “He is very protective of his network and of the people he’s trying to help, as he should be,” says Gavin of Kim, an extraordinary figure who risks being kidnapped every time he travels for work. “He made a promise to his God that when he helps with these escapes he will go all the way. That’s what keeps him resolved, but I know he’s terrified at times.”
With so much at stake, Gavin relied on Kim to set the boundaries on what information could be shared, as well as the logistics of filming. In China, where North Koreans are apprehended as illegal migrants and sent back to their country, the Ro family were shot by one of Kim’s ‘brokers’ – human traffickers who might help people find freedom one week and sell women into sex slavery the next, depending on the highest bidder. For their trek through the Vietnamese jungle, Kim allowed Gavin’s Korean director of photography Hyun Seok Kim to film, but the non-Asian members of the crew were held back for fear of jeopardising the family’s safety.
Another problem presented itself in the form of consent. Gavin obtained permission from a Ro family member in Seoul to film their escape, but seeking consent from the family itself as they fought to evade capture was impossible; instead, Gavin and her team had to take a leap of faith. “We went into this entire thing knowing we might not be able to use anything we were shooting, because we made the promise that if the Ro family didn’t want this to be on film in the end, it wasn’t gonna happen,” says Gavin, who “freaked out” her producer with the gamble. “There was no way for a family who had just escaped North Korea, who knew nothing about the outside world, to even conceive of the idea of this film.”
As a counterpoint to the main action of the story, Gavin unearths secretly recorded footage documenting life inside the hermit kingdom, whose human rights record the UN recently compared to the Nazis’. The revelations run from the absurd – ‘dust inspections’ on portraits of Kim Jung-un hung in family homes – to the chilling: Hyeonseo Lee says she was seven when she was taken out of school to witness her first public execution. People are taught from an early age that the country is a utopia, and their blindness to the outside world is near-total: when the grandma sees a television in a safehouse the family use in Laos, she mistakes it for a blackboard.
One of the first things Kim Jong-un did when he came to power was to make defection a treacherous offence, and relatives of those who escape face banishment orders that may well be a death sentence. These are the circumstances in which the Ro family fled, and it is at times unbearable to see their faces flit between joy and terror as they trek through jungles, snow-capped mountains and fast-flowing rivers, constantly one false move from catastrophe.
Indeed, the film might feel exploitative if it wasn’t so blindingly urgent: at the time of writing, South Korea is putting pressure on the Chinese government to stop the repatriation of North Korean refugees, which recently resumed after Covid border restrictions came to an end. Closer to home, where refugee stories too often become political footballs for populist ghouls and tabloid papers alike, it also feels important to have an account where the emphasis is placed unambiguously on the desperation and bravery that makes these journeys possible.
Gavin hopes her film will ignite policy debate in the US and in South Korea, where defectors are not always welcomed with open arms. But she also has another audience in mind. “We’re hoping the film gets into North Korea,” says Gavin, “which I think it probably will. As much as one of the main focuses of the Kim regime right now is making sure nothing crosses the border with China, it does happen.” And if it does, that might be the most miraculous thing of all.
Beyond Utopia is out in UK cinemas on October 27.