Documentary film “Beyond Utopia”, which won the Audience Award when it was premiered at the US Documentary Competition section of the Sundance Film Festival early in last year, is alternatively chilling and harrowing in its close observation of several North Korean defectors. Yes, there are still many people trying to escape from North Korea even at this point, and the stories of these desperate people are some of the most heartbreaking refugee tales in our current time.

At first, the documentary focuses on Kim Sung-eun, a South Korean Christian pastor who have devoted himself to helping North Korean defectors for more than 20 years. Mainly depending on his connections with those local brokers operating around the border between China and North Korea, he has helped many North Korean defectors not only escape from North Korea but also arrive safely in South Korea despite many obstacles including those heartless Chinese local authorities. As a matter of fact, he is even quite willing to take some big risk for himself outside South Korea although he is often advised not to do that by the South Korean government for becoming persona non grata to China and North Korea.

Pastor Kim later tells us a bit about the origin of his humanitarian devotion to North Korean defectors. When he went to the border area between China and North Korea for the first time in the early 1990s, he often witnessed how things were really hard and difficult for the people of North Korea, and he became determined to help them as much as possible. He even came to marry a North Korean woman later, and the documentary gives us a glimpse of their happy domestic life in South Korea.

Meanwhile, director/editor Madeleine Gavin and several other interviewees occasionally provide some historical background information on North Korea. While Korea was finally liberated from the brutal Japanese colonization period after the end of the World War II, it was immediately divided by US and the Soviet Union, and that eventually led to the Korean War in 1950. Although the war was practically over after the armistice in 1953, North and South Korea kept conflicting with each other as a part of the ongoing Cold War, and this political conflict has been sadly continued for more than 30 years even after the end of Cold War in the early 1990s.

After the end of the Cold War, North Korea, which was already far behind South Korea in terms of economy and many other things, came to hit one bottom after another bottom under its unprecedented dictatorship, which is a deranged mix of communism, Confucianism, and monarchy. Its first leader Kim Il-sung was succeeded by his son Kim Jong-il in 1994, who was then succeed by his son Kim Jong-un in 2011. For the constant control over the country, many of North Korean people have been thoroughly brainwashed to worship their leaders throughout their life as their world becomes more and more like a hell on the earth, and anyone trying to escape was severely punished for giving a savage lesson for others in North Korea.

Nevertheless, many North Koreans have continued to attempt to escape, and we hear about how they are driven to such a risky and desperate decision. Even while its economy is going down and down, North Korea and its despicable leader always put most of its scarce resource to its military power mainly represented by the development of weapons of mass destruction such as nuclear weapon, and that leads to lots of poverty and starvation in the country. Even though things will be more perilous once they cross the border, North Korean defectors are more than willing to take enormous risks, and Pastor Kim is ready to rescue them whenever some of them manage to contact with him via those local brokers.

As it shifts its focus from Pastor Kim to North Korean defectors, the documentary alternates between two narrative lines. In one side, we meet a North Korean defector who had to leave behind her young son in North Korea around 10 years ago, and she is certainly nervous when she is notified that her son may soon come across the border. In the other side, we meet a North Korean family who manages to escape from North Korea just like a few family members of theirs, and you may brace for yourself as frequently being reminded of how they get suddenly arrested and then sent back to North Korea at any point.

Without hurrying itself, the documentary steadily follows the progress of both sides, and what is shown to us in front of the cameras of cinematographer Kim Hyun-seok and several figures not mentioned in the documentary is harrowingly gloomy to say the least. Even when the crew members of the documentary can approach closer to that North Korean defector family after they eventually succeeded in getting out of China, there are always tension and anxiety around them and Pastor Kim, and one of the saddest moments in the documentary comes from when some of them cannot help but automatically praise their fearless leader despite experiencing more of the free world outside North Korea.

On the whole, “Beyond Utopia”, which was recently included in the shortlist for Best Documentary Oscar, do not show anything particularly new to me and South Korean audiences, but it still has some earnest emotional power to hold our attention. To be frank with you, it makes me reflect more on how frequently many North Korean defectors are mistreated and discriminated in the South Korean society after struggling through all those dangers across the border, and I sincerely hope that there will be more documentaries to tell their tragic stories.