BEYOND UTOPIA TBC

Seeking sanctuary…

★★★★★ OUT 27 OCTOBER CINEMAS

This chilling documentary follows families attempting to escape North Korea

Madeleine Gavin’s extraordinary, Sundance Audience Award-winning documentary follows North Korean dissidents fleeing for their lives from Kim Jong Un’s repressive regime. They’re helped by an ‘underground network’ of anonymous brokers overseen by Chinese pastor Seungeun Kim, a true guardian angel whose aim is to get them through fellow Communist countries China, Vietnam and Laos to the safety of Thailand. Along the way, they face untold potential dangers - being shot by border guards, captured by organ harvesters, or lost in the jungle - but staying means torture, imprisonment and death, so what choice do they have?

Skilfully edited together from various clandestine sources, Beyond Utopia focuses on Kim’s attempts to help the Roh family, whose harrowing, heart-in-mouth progress is captured in panicky snatches of camera-phone footage. Other defectors - such as anguished mother Soyeon Lee - aren’t so fortunate. In between, Gavin builds a damning portrait of North Korea, the ‘utopia’ of the title, where abject poverty and state-sponsored violence keep the people obedient.

During a rare moment of calm, we see the Roh family blithely singing a North Korean propaganda song. It’s beautiful and chilling at the same time. How do you escape a prison so all-encompassing it’s been drilled into your brain? As Grandma Roh puts it, sorrowfully, ‘We were born in the wrong country.

THE VERDICT An unblinking exploration of human courage – and kindness – in the face of unthinkable tyranny.