#beyond utopia

Usually, when refugees flee an oppressive regime, they know what they’re leaving behind; they can taste the freedom they’re searching for. But part of the story “Beyond Utopia” tells is that the citizens of North Korea don’t fully understand how oppressed they are. They can’t; they’ve never seen any other way of being.

In that sense, apart from Nazi Germany, the country that North Korea most resembles is Mao’s China during the insanity of the Cultural Revolution and the Great Leap Forward. Tens of millions of people died in China from famine, due to Mao’s disastrously unhinged economic policies. In the aftermath, partly to cover all that up, China became the first National Propaganda Media State, subjecting its vast populace to a daily brainwashing, with Mao held up as a living deity.

The North Korean regime, in many ways a depraved outgrowth of Maoism, goes even further. As the film shows us, it has taken its made-up theology from the Bible, with Kim Jong-un portrayed as a Christ figure, and we see footage of the great mass stadium exhibitions that the citizens, including thousands of schoolchildren, rehearse for a year at a time — displays that look like the opening ceremony of the Olympics staged on a mile-wide electronic billboard in which every LED light is a choreographed human being. All of this loony-tunes spectacle is meant to celebrate the “utopia” of North Korea, with the outside world, especially America, portrayed as such a demonic place that the only word used to refer to someone in the U.S. is “American-bastard.”

The joyless suppression of life in North Korea prompts at least some citizens to suspect that a better life must lay on the other side. The family of defectors in “Beyond Utopia” are like that; they’re ordinary people who have put themselves on a moving mission.

Beyond Utopia (2023)

A family flees

North Korea’s oppression

Pastor clears their path

Films of 2023: Beyond Utopia (dir. Madeline Gavin)