The grandmother is the oldest in the Roh family, whose harrowing overland journey from North Korea to Thailand provides the spine of director-editor Madeleine Gavin’s engrossing film. Also on the arduous trek are the woman’s daughter and son-in-law and their two young daughters. Their guide, who joins them in person for part of the trip, is Pastor Seungeun Kim. He’s a Seoul-based facilitator who estimates his “underground railroad” has helped 1,000 people flee the non-utopia where his wife was born.
The Rohs’ struggles are all the more gripping because they’re seen in authentic images. The film includes a few short animated sections — which don’t portray the Rohs — but there are no reenactments. Gavin and her crew followed the family on part of their voyage; other episodes are depicted with video from cellphones or hidden cameras. Though often low-definition, the video is immediate and absorbing, and edited skillfully. “Beyond Utopia” is sort of a found-footage horror flick, except that both the footage and the horror are real.
The Rohs decided to cross the Yalu River to China — the direct route across the demilitarized zone between North and South is too dangerous to attempt — because other family members had already fled. Under a new decree, relatives of people who had defected during the last three years were to be imprisoned in Soviet-style gulags or banished without supplies to a wilderness in the country’s far north. It’s to escape these possible fates, not out of any other discontent, that the family decides to leave.
What the Rohs find on their travels — elevators, indoor plumbing, flat-screen TVs and Americans who are friendly rather than murderous — astounds them. It turns out that a humble safe house in Laos looks a lot more like utopia than any place they’d seen in North Korea.
Two other narrative strands extend through the film. One is the testimony of defector Hyeonseo Lee, who’s become a polished (and English-speaking) public critic of her former homeland. The second is the story of anguished mother Soyeon Lee, also a defector, who tries to arrange the escape of the now-17-year-old son she left behind a decade ago. The result of her quest is wrenching.
“Beyond Utopia” contains background material on the history, culture and travails of North Korea that’s necessary but clunkily presented. The filmmakers also take an irksome turn toward the predictable during some of the travel sequences, adding conventional piano-and-strings movie music. But the rest of the movie is fresh and compelling.
Pastor Kim is motivated by Christian faith and personal history. Most of the other people portrayed in the film are impelled by fear, deprivation and love of family. But the underground railroad that runs circuitously between the two Koreas runs on something even more basic: greed. Black-market money fuels the preacher’s operation, and its smugglers are no more to be trusted than the coyotes who lead migrants across the Mexico-U.S. border. At one point during the Rohs’ journey, they and Pastor Kim worry they’re being led in circles in preparation for a shakedown.
The various people who lead the Rohs across rivers, over mountains and around border checkpoints never appear on-screen. None of them are interviewed, even off-camera or disguised. More information about them would have been interesting, although their reluctance to provide any is hardly surprising. “Beyond Utopia” illuminates aspects of North Korea that few have ever seen before, but it can’t dispel all the shadows that cloak Kim Jong Un’s hermit kingdom.
PG-13. At the Angelika Film Center Mosaic. Contains mature thematic material, violence, and disturbing images of torture and corpses. 115 minutes.