I do hopefully-faintly-amusing film reviews – a laugh, a joke, and if we're really lucky a morsel of genuine critical insight – not sincere commentary on human rights issues and humanitarian crises. But occasionally, like today, you get an intersection of the two. Now when it comes to human rights and associated crises, as far as the media is concerned it seems to be a case of most recent atrocity wins, which is why the situation in Ukraine has been displaced by what's happening in Israel and Gaza, and why what's happening in Israel and Gaza will most likely get shunted from the top slot on news broadcasts whenever the next thing comes along. Loudest shout wins.

The problem of North Korea has been going on for so long that most people probably don't even think of it as a problem any more – we just treat it as a given, part of the geopolitical reality. Perhaps this is one of the great achievements of the regime there, along with constructing a relatively-stable, sustainable inherited dictatorship. The Kim dynasty have won top prize in this particular field by acquiring their own nuclear deterrent, most likely making them immune to external attempts at regime change (one suspects the Kims observed the fates of Ceaucescu, Saddam and Gaddafi with some interest). So the country looks set to endure, both fortress and prison, a scar on the face of the world.

It's something we are so familiar with that it has lost the capacity to provoke emotion. Making an attempt to rectify this and put a human face on the issue is Madeleine Gavin's Beyond Utopia – a catchy if slightly oblique title, explained early on by a North Korean defector who says she thought her home town was perfect until she escaped to the outside world and learned that, to coin a phrase, everything she thought she knew was wrong. This disconnect between the perspective of most North Korean citizens and the reality accepted by most of the rest of the world is one of the most interesting issues raised by the film, but somewhat sadly it's only a minor element.

The bulk of the film focuses on Sengeun Kim, a South Korean pastor who is big on helping people defect to the south. Kim is a genial fellow who nevertheless has that slightly not-of-this-world quality you often find with the intensely devout and dedicated. A glimpse of his relationship with his wife – herself a defected North Korean army officer – is fascinating and humanising (Mrs Kim says she initially fell for him because of his slight resemblance to Kim Jong Un) but too brief.

The heart of the film concerns the story of a family of five Northerners that Kim is trying to help. Initially, they are stuck just over the river from North Korea in China. As the border between north and south is effectively impossible to cross, anyone wishing to defect must cross the northern border with China, and then somehow make their way overland down through China, Vietnam and Laos, avoiding being picked up by the police all the way, and get into Thailand. Needless to say a network of 'brokers' (basically people smugglers) has sprung up to service this 'underground railway'. The morality of their activities is, of course, profoundly questionable, but Kim elects to work with them as there is no other choice.

It is hairy stuff for both the defectors and Kim, who runs the risk of being kidnapped and exfiltrated to Pyongyang every time he goes abroad, or being sent to prison if he's caught illegally in Thailand. There is a lot of camera-phone footage of them looking nervously through SUV windows or hiding in motel rooms – all of it apparently authentic – and a long sequence where all of them, including an 80-year-old granny, have to crawl for ten hours through the jungle to get across the Laotian-Vietnamese border. It is gripping and quite nerve-wracking, but after a while you do get a bit desensitised to it. It's also hard to shake the suspicion that this has all been edited to be as heart-rendingly moving as possible.

Intercut with this is a relentlessly grim story about a defector in Seoul who hasn't seen her teenaged son since she left the north a decade earlier, and is trying to arrange to have him brought out of the country. Suffice to say it all goes horribly, horribly wrong, to the point where you almost sense the director recoiling slightly lest it become too overwhelming for the audience.

For me, a third thread was probably most interesting, dealing with the reality of everyday life inside North Korea – the need to keep the household portraits of the Kim dynasty dust-free or face severe punishment, the bizarre phenomenon of people stealing each other's excrement in order to meet strict provision quotas to assist the country's agriculture, chilling videos of small children cheerfully singing borderline-obscene anti-US propaganda songs. There is, as one contributor comments, almost a science-fictional quality to the conceptual disconnect between the worldview of most North Koreans and that of the rest of the world. The Bible is banned there largely to obscure the degree to which it has been plagiarised to service the cult of personality surrounding the Kim dynasty, or so we are told.

The thoroughness of this indoctrination gradually becomes clear as it emerges that many defectors leave the country only reluctantly, feeling pushed out rather than having any desire to go. 80-year-old granny weeps as she insists that North Korea could be a great country, and that its people should work harder to make Kim Jong Un happy – he has so many heavy responsibilities for such a young man (organising the country, cementing his grip on power, having political rivals assassinated and executed with heavy artillery, etc). The two children of the family happily reveal that they think the greatest person in the world is... Kim Jong Un!

Cult-like devotion to political leaders who may not be entirely worthy of it is not limited to dictatorships in distant climes, of course (vide current US poll ratings and Nadine Dorries' new book). It almost feels like a clash of religions as Pastor Kim takes on Leader Kim – and there's a telling sequence where the pastor instructs the clearly-baffled defector family in how to say grace with him before eating. Their hard-won freedom of thought may not be as absolute as one might think, at least if the priest has anything to do with it. (There's a final irony, as well: the defectors (spoiler alert) win their freedom, and embark upon new lives of enormous possibility. It is late 2019. The film catches up with them six months later, when they are confined to their apartment and forced to wear face-masks because of coronavirus. The impact of the virus on North Korea is not touched on, but it seems that it has made things even worse there.)

There seems to be some money behind this film – the screening I attended was basically a free show – and one can't help wondering if one has wandered into the same kind of faith-based cinema world that films like Sound of Freedom inhabit. It concludes with the contact details of a number of faith-based charitable concerns who would, I expect, be very grateful for financial support. But whatever you think of the religious angle to this particular undertaking, Beyond Utopia is a startling view into a very different world and a reminder of troubling facts most of us would probably prefer to forget.

Awix

13.11.23 Front Page

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