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Imagine living in a country where you have to struggle even to get drinking water! You have to pack and submit your feces to your government, thanks to the lack of sewage systems and the fear of punishment! You don’t have any basic human rights, and you aren’t even allowed to leave the country and go somewhere else! So what do you do then? You escape, risking your life, because you would rather die trying to be free than live in the hellhole called North Korea. Madeleine Gavin’s latest documentary, titled Beyond Utopia, deals with this grave subject matter. It talks about every terrible thing the North Korean regime endorses in a never-before-seen, no-holds-barred manner. Unfolding like a pulsating thriller from the get-go, Beyond Utopia centers on Pastor Kim and documents his attempt to help out two North Korean families fleeing the country. It’s a fascinating watch from start to finish,...

In the snowy hills of Park City this year, North Korea refugee documentary “Beyond Utopia” made a splash. This 115-minute feature keeps its viewers at the edge of their seats. In follows the harrowing defection journeys for the Roh family, which includes two children and an octogenarian, and records the brutal capture and torture of Soyeon Lee's son at the North Korean border.

Throughout the course of the film, the proximity to the subject material is quite jarring. The American film crew witnesses the Roh family and Pastor Kim, their South Korean guardian, through the Yalu River, China, the jungles of Laos, and eventually reaching the Thai shores of the Mekong River.

Now, in light of awards season, we revisit our own close encounter with the team – an in-person interview with producers Sue Mi Terry, Rachel Cohen, and documentary subjects Pastor Kim and Soyeon Lee – at the Larsen office in San Francisco.

You may think you have a notion of how terrible it is to live in North Korea. You don’t. The media shows us military parades and atomic bomb tests. But many of the isolated country’s 26 million inhabitants are hungry or starving, and believe that America is their sworn enemy. It is impossible to cross the Dmz between North and South Korea, riddled with 2 million landmines, so anyone brave enough to defect must follow an elaborate route through China, which is friendly to North Korea, as well as several other hostile Communist countries, in order to reach safety in Thailand. And if a defector is caught, they go straight to the gulag, where they are beaten and tortured.

In the eye-opening “Beyond Utopia”, from editor-turned-director Madeleine Gavin (“City of Joy”), which won the U.S. documentary audience award at Sundance 2023, we follow a heroic and fearless Christian pastor, Seungeun Kim,...

Harrowing stories have been told by those who’ve survived their escape from North Korea, but that struggle emerges with a startling urgency in director Madeleine Gavin’s Beyond Utopia with footage unlike any we’ve seen before. The film uses interviews with defectors and archival footage to provide historical context about the stringent control that North Korea’s security apparatus has over its citizens and how they’re bombarded and controlled by propaganda. But it’s the hidden camera and cellphone footage taken by defectors themselves that most terrifyingly attests to the horrors committed by the kleptocratic dynastic regime.

The on-the-grounds footage focuses primarily on Hyukchang Wu and his family, who at the start of the film are hiding along the border between China and North Korea. We witness their first contact with Seungeun Kim, a well-known pastor who, with minimal resources, has managed to help numerous people escape from North Korea.

An astonishing real-life geopolitical thriller with a very run-of-the-mill historical explainer grafted to it like a remora, Madeleine Gavin’s documentary Beyond Utopia is so packed with high-stakes tension and nail-biting set-pieces that it’s fairly easy, and probably even ideal, to ignore its clunky structuring and expositional choices.

Beyond Utopia is primarily a three-pronged story about the perils of defecting from modern North Korea, as well as the nightmarish realities that make defecting such a necessity.

Seoul-based Pastor Seungeun Kim has spent decades putting his own life in jeopardy to coordinate and facilitate defections. He has a network of ethically compromised brokers in North Korea, China, Vietnam, Laos and Thailand, but he’s more than just a guy moving strategic pieces from a distance. Motivated in part by personal trauma, Pastor Kim’s own participation in these escapes has left him with broken bones and a rap sheet in several countries.

"This film is about people attempting to escape from one of the most dangerous countries on Earth." That line of text fades up on the screen in the opening minutes of Madeleine Gavin's "Beyond Utopia," an absolutely harrowing documentary that captures the terrifying process of what it's like to try to cross the border and make a break from Kim Jong-un's totalitarian North Korean regime. Without relying on live-action recreations, the movie is instead comprised of footage captured by three groups: the filmmakers, operatives who participate in a secret underground network, and the subjects themselves. "Beyond Utopia" provides a grounded, human element to the atrocities happening in North Korea, and the results are intense, thrilling, heartbreaking, and vital.

Talking head interviews with people like defector and author Hyeonseo Lee paint a bleak picture of life inside the North Korean borders and provide first-hand accounting of the lies and...

“Beyond Utopia” offers an astonishing look at the lengths people will go for freedom. The new documentary, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, where it has attracted interest from several streaming companies, takes viewers on a harrowing journey as one family risks everything to escape from North Korea.

For director Madeleine Gavin, “Beyond Utopia” is an opportunity to change the conversation around the repressive regime by moving the focus from its brutal leader Kim Jong-un and onto the ordinary citizens who have been abused and neglected by the country.

“As I researched this film, I became more and more outraged that nobody is talking about North Koreans themselves,” says Gavin. “I wanted to crack that world open to people. Too often, we focus on what North Korea’s leaders want us to focus on, which is their nukes. That’s their only leverage. Without them, they would not exist as a country.