The toxic anti-Shangri-La of North Korea continues to provide a rich seam of material for film-makers: the late Claude Lanzmann recounted his personal experiences there in the 1950s in Napalm and Werner Herzog discussed the North Korean reverence for Mount Paektu in Into the Inferno. There are many more, including Álvaro Longaria’s The Propaganda Game, Ross Adam and Robert Cannan’s The Lovers and the Despot, Morten Traavik’s Liberation Day and Ryan White’s Assassins. So far no documentary film-maker to my knowledge has tackled one of North Korea’s strangest events: Kim Jong-un’s summit meeting in 2018 with Donald Trump, the man who’d threatened him with “fire and fury”. Oddly, this otherwise excellent documentary about North Korea doesn’t mention that, despite it coming within its timeline.
Beyond Utopia is a nail-bitingly tense account of the network of safe houses and “underground railroads” used by North Korean defectors to get to freedom, run by the South Korean human rights activist and Christian cleric Pastor Kim Sung-eun. (There is real escape footage here.) Despite the well-attested ideological iron grip exerted in North Korea (no one in this film uses the pro-regime term DPRK or Democratic People’s Republic of Korea), there are in fact traffickers and brokers both there and in China who for a price are prepared to get people out.
