Beyond Utopia

➤Rated PG-13
➤Streaming platforms

It’s a terror-filled video call. The Roh family—a married couple, their two girls, and their 80-year-old grandmother—have crossed the Yalu River from North Korea into China. They’re huddled in darkness with a human smuggler, using his phone to plead for help from Pastor Seungeun Kim of Caleb Mission Church in Seoul, South Korea. The “broker,” as the new documentary Beyond Utopia refers to the smuggler, found the family wandering in the mountains above the river, and he’s contacted Kim before. One little girl cries. They’re all afraid, knowing capture by Chinese patrols will mean repatriation to North Korea, followed by the punishments meted out to defectors: gulag, torture, death.

Beyond Utopia follows the Rohs’ story and another defection attempt as they are happening. Although “some details are disguised,” there are “no re-creations.” Video footage of the Rohs’ harrowing 2019 flight comes from the documentary’s film crew, Kim’s network of contacts, and brokers.

Kim and a Roh relative from Seoul join the escapees at a secret location in China to help them. Together, they set out by car on a route thousands of miles long that connects safe houses. Their perilous voyage takes them through China, Vietnam, and Laos—all countries friendly with North Korea. They dodge police on unpaved roads, and they scramble on foot at night over treacherous mountain terrain. They hope to reach safety in Thailand.

The film alternates between the Rohs’ journey and Soyeon Lee’s efforts to rescue her son. Lee left her son, Cheong, behind when she defected from North Korea 10 years earlier. From South Korea, she contacts Cheong through brokers, but word later reaches her that Chinese officials captured him shortly after he crossed the Yalu River. The film records her desperate phone conversations, including wire-transfer negotiations with brokers to pay for information about her son. Are the brokers stringing her along?

One of the two stories ends in tragedy. The documentary also inserts North Korean propaganda videos of a happy populace to contrast with smuggled video footage of the country’s dilapidated infrastructure, beatings in police stations, ­executions, and dead bodies in streets and rivers. The disturbing scenes take viewers into the hellish, Pennsylvania-sized cult compound that supreme leader Kim Jong Un, his father, and his grandfather have ruled for eight decades. Viewers will find it hard to escape the sense of powerlessness that suffocates the North Korean people.

But some Christian organizations are putting their money and lives on the line to rescue North Koreans, often cooperating with human smugglers. Still, the film shows Pastor Kim dealing with these smugglers as shrewdly as a ­serpent. Why go to all this effort? Kim reveals his son’s accidental death propelled him to rescue imperiled children and families—a thousand in 10 years, he claims.

“In Christian terms,” Kim says, “my son was the grain of wheat.”