Muffled sobs were heard in a Seoul school auditorium Wednesday as children and parents reacted to a powerful but distressing documentary about human tragedies unfolding just 35 miles north of where they sat.
“Beyond Utopia,” released in October, was widely considered a contender for Oscar documentary glory but, to considerable surprise, was not nominated. In the run-up to the awards, the film divided many Asian Americans who worked on it and who pilloried it.
If the Oscar snub disappointed the filmmakers, matters are worse for the film’s central subject.
Since the COVID-19 pandemic, the “Underground Railway” that secretly runs defectors from the North Korea-China border to South Korea is more tenuous and hazardous to navigate than ever before. At great peril to its makers, the film uses predominantly smartphone footage to follow a North Korean family, the Rohs — two parents, two daughters, a grandmother — as they escape their isolated, heavily policed country.
Conveyed by activist South Korean Pastor Kim Seong-eun and “brokers” — human traffickers and smugglers — the family crosses mountainous terrain near North Korea’s border with China and finds temporary refuge in safe houses. Their odyssey carries them down Chinese highways and through Vietnamese back roads and the Laotian jungle before they cross the Mekong into democratic Thailand and freedom.
In intimate detail, the film captures the family’s astonishment — the grandmother thinks a flat-screen TV is a blackboard — and deeply programmed existence, as when the children praise North Korean leader Kim Jong-un. There is humor and fear, hardship and hope.
Alongside the Rohs’ rugged but successful journey, the film charts an even more wrenching parallel story. It follows Lee So-yeon, a middle-aged defector in Seoul, as she employs brokers to extract her son from North Korea. The effort fails, and he is captured and imprisoned.
Cameras capture Ms. Lee’s accelerating anguish as she speaks to brokers in North Korea who use smuggled cellphones. The son faces severe torture, including multiple fractures. Unable to eat, he shrinks to half his previous size, Ms. Lee learns.
Her mother, in North Korea and terrified of the consequences of her grandson’s imprisonment, tells a weeping Ms. Lee she is severing all contact with her. Desperate, Ms. Lee promises brokers more money to bribe prison guards. Her efforts are useless, and in the film’s most agonizing scene, she learns that her son is trapped in a gulag from which there is no exit.
After a screening at Dulwich College, a private school for well-to-do international students in Seoul’s swanky Gangnam district, students were subdued.
“It made me realize how privileged we are and sad at what they had to go through to live like us. And we did not have to do anything,” said Aalya, 11. (Dulwich asked to identify pupils by their first names.)
“We are lucky to be born on the right side of the world,” said Rita Andreeti, an Italian parent. “But that’s no excuse to ignore the other side.”
“It was an incredibly moving story,” said Tamara Mawhinney, Canadian ambassador to South Korea.
Absent at the Academy Awards
Film critics also praised the documentary.
The Guardian called the film “nail-bitingly tense,” and rogerebert.com found it “frequently jaw-dropping.” Reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, where it has a 100% score, called it “humanitarian journalism in its purest form” and “one of the most daring works of cinematic journalism in recent memory.”
“Beyond Utopia” won awards at film festivals such as Sundance, Sydney and Woodstock and was nominated at many more, including the British Academy Film Awards. It failed to qualify for the ultimate prize, however. After joining the 15-strong shortlist for best documentary feature, it was not among the five final nominees.
Though award shows are rife with surprises, the lack of a nomination raised eyebrows in the film industry. Hollywood Reporter named “Beyond Utopia” one of the year’s “surprise omissions.” Variety wrote that it “should have been there.”
In the run-up to Oscar night on March 10, the film had gained enemies. Groups and individuals who opposed Washington’s policies toward the Koreas were vocal critics.
Women Cross DMZ is a civic group that visited North Korea and crossed the DMZ into South Korea in 2015. Marchers included feminist icon Gloria Steinem and Hollywood heiress Abigail Disney. The nongovernmental organization, which lobbies for a formal end to the Korean War and the removal of U.S. sanctions, urged members to read and distribute critiques of the film.
A trio of Asian American filmmakers posted a series of online letters criticizing “Beyond Utopia,” a film made in 2023, for failing to contextualize the U.S. role in the Korean Peninsula’s division in 1945 and for understating American actions in the hideous carnage of the Korean War, which ended via an armistice in 1953.
Calling the film “unbalanced and inaccurate,” they blamed U.S. sanctions for exacerbating North Korea’s dire economic conditions but slammed the documentary’s stress on its poverty. They questioned the “unequal power relationships” between Pastor Kim and the Rohs and accused the film’s producers and talking heads — such as Liberty in North Korea, or LINK, an NGO that assists defectors — of partisanship.
Peace activist Iris Kim made similar arguments in a Daily Beast op-ed titled “The Academy was right to snub this dehumanizing documentary.” She concluded: “A white filmmaker presented a highly fragmented and incomplete version of Korea’s continued division to a Western audience, who unfortunately fell head over heels for its flattened narrative.”
Women Cross DMZ founder Christine Ahn, citing a busy schedule, declined to discuss “Beyond Utopia.”
Sue Mi Terry, one of the film’s co-producers, a former CIA analyst whose background was lambasted by the documentary’s critics, said she was “perplexed and disappointed” by what she called an attack on the film, with “unfair and unfounded assertions.”
“While the critics of our film appear more sympathetic to the North Korean regime, our sympathies lie with the people of North Korea,” Ms. Terry said.
Underground Railway loses steam
The dramas captured in “Beyond Utopia” were filmed before the pandemic and mass lockdowns.
Defections from North Korea have steadily declined since 2020, but not because human rights are improving. Freedom House, in its Freedom in the World 2023 report, ranked North Korea third, alongside Eritrea, in the “Worst of the Worst” countries globally.
During the COVID crisis, North Korea massively upgraded border security, including new physical barriers and snipers to shoot those trying to leave.
“Pyongyang has built hundreds of kilometers of new or upgraded border fences, walls and guard posts, commercial satellite imagery shows, enabling it to tighten the flow of information and goods into the country, keep foreign elements out and its people in,” the Reuters news agency, citing satellite data, reported last year.
Neighboring China also has upgraded its formidable, AI-empowered national surveillance apparatus.
This means the Underground Railroad the Rohs traveled has “eroded,” said Hannah Song, CEO of LINK, who attended the Dulwich College screening.
Defections were “much more prevalent” before COVID, she said. “Now it is much more difficult to establish those networks.”
• Andrew Salmon can be reached at asalmon@washingtontimes.com.
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