‘Beyond Utopia’ captures harrowing odyssey of 2 defector families
South Korean society needs to pay more attention to the plight of North Korean refugees, and warring political parties need to establish some “don’t touch policies” to support them, and remain consistent even as administrations change, according to a leading activist in Seoul.
“North Korea is one of the most intractable problems of our time and it doesn’t get enough attention,” said Hannah Song, the president and CEO of Liberty in North Korea, a nonprofit organization that helps North Koreans escape and resettle.
“The few who arrive here are a symptom of this problem. We need to institutionalize some don’t-touch policies to support them,” she said.
Song was addressing an audience of students, teachers and parents, March 20, at Dulwich College Seoul, the British international school that opened in the capital in 2010. Her talk followed a screening of the recently released 2023 defector documentary “Beyond Utopia.”
She urged young people to be more involved in the issue.
The movie includes secret film footage from inside North Korea, including a scene of a public execution, which is why it is rated PG-13.
It tells the stories in real time and in harrowing detail of two families. Lee So-yeon is a defector in South Korea working through brokers in China and North Korea to rescue her 17-year-old son, who she has not seen since her escape 10 years earlier. In a heartbreaking outcome, the plan fails. Go-betweens find out her son is caught in China, returned to North Korea, severely tortured and sent to the gulag. Her own mother inside North Korea conveys the message that she wants no more contact with her.
Five members of another family are found hiding in China by someone who calls Kim Seung-eun, a Protestant pastor in Cheonan whose wife is North Korean, to see if he can do anything.
Kim, who has arranged the escape of around 1,000 defectors and who was helping Lee, joins the family for a dramatic 12,000-kilometer journey from one safe house to another through China, Vietnam and Laos and across the Mekong River to freedom in Thailand.
In all, the defection involved 50 brokers, some of whom one night appeared to lead Kim and the family around in circles in the Lao jungle as a tactic to extract more money.
Directed by Madeleine Gavin, “Beyond Utopia” came to popular awareness after it won an award at the Sundance Film Festival.
The movie was expected to be nominated for this year’s Academy Awards but failed to make it following criticism by the Women Cross DMZ organization and others that it stereotyped North Koreans and failed to mention the 1950-53 Korean War and sufficiently blame the United States for their plight.
The events in the film took place shortly before the North Korean border was closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and were filmed on smuggled mobile phones and handheld cameras.
There are around 34,000 North Koreans in South Korea. They have been coming since the end of the 1950-53 Korean War. In early decades, they tended to be soldiers. It was the famine of the 1990s, when ordinary people, mostly women, crossed illegally into China in search of food and started to make their way south.
These refugees break the law at both ends. Not only do they enter China and other countries illegally. But they leave illegally. North Korea criminalizes even the expression of the desire to emigrate and forbids people from moving abroad except for official purposes. China sends refugees back, where they face brutal interrogations and prison, particularly if suspected of having met South Koreans or religious activists in China.
At one point around 3,000 were arriving here each year, but these numbers dropped dramatically after Kim Jong-un began a crackdown. With COVID-19, they dropped to around 60 over two years. Numbers began to pick up in 2023 with the arrival of around 200, most of whom are believed to have already been outside of North Korea.
Once out, North Koreans tend to become extremely bitter at the regime that controls their country. “I run out of words to describe how angry I am,” one man said in the documentary.
Song said that successive governments here tend to change the level of support provided to defectors.
Typically, conservatives are comfortable with the implicit criticism of North Korea and more supportive of refugees while progressives seek to downplay their presence in the interest of improved government-to-government ties.
Song noted that young South Koreans are far less interested in North Korea than the older generation, to the point that they feel North Korea is a foreign country and don’t care about reunification.
“We need to change the narrative on North Korea away from Kim Jong-un and nuclear weapons to focus on the people. We all have a role to play in that,” she said.
“I would love to see more young people involved,” she told the students.