There were muffled sobs 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 last October, was widely considered a contender for Oscar documentary glory, but — to considerable surprise — was not nominated. In the run-up to the awards, controversy erupted as the film divided many Asian Americans, both those who worked on it and those 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 now more tenuous and hazardous to navigate than ever. 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” – people 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, through Vietnamese back roads and Laotian jungle before they cross the Mekong into democratic Thailand and freedom.
In intimate detail the film captures the family’s astonishment — the grandma 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, following 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 cell phones. 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,” added Rita Andreeti, an Italian parent. ”But that’s no excuse to ignore the other side.”
“It was an incredibly moving story,” added Canadian Ambassador to Korea Tamara Mawhinney.
Absent at the Academy Awards
Film critics also praised the documentary.
The Guardian called the film “nail-bitingly tense,” while roberteber.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” bagged awards at multiple film festivals, including Sundance, Sydney and Woodstock, and nominations at many more, including the UK’s BAFTAs. 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.”
But in the run-up to Oscar night March 10, the film had gained some enemies. Groups and individuals who oppose Washington’s policies toward the Koreas were vocal critics.
Women Cross DMZ is a civic group that in 2015 visited North Korea and crossed the DMZ into South Korea, with marchers who included feminist icon Gloria Steinem and Hollywood heiress Abigail Disney. The NGO, which lobbies for a formal end to the Korean War and 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 letters online, 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 “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.
Similar arguments were made by peace activist Iris Kim in the “Daily Beast” in an op-ed entitled, “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 global pandemic and mass lockdowns.
Defections from North Korea have steadily declined since 2020, but not because human rights are improving in North Korea. Freedom House, in its Freedom in the World 2023 report, put it in joint third place (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 stationing snipers to shoot those trying to cross the frontier.
“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 reported, citing satellite data, last year.
Neighboring China also has upgraded its formidable, AI-empowered national surveillance apparatus.
This means the Underground Railroad the Rohs traveled is now “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.”