Yahoo Movies Beyond Utopia director details 'agonising' experience filming North Korean defector's struggle
Madeleine Gavin speaks to Yahoo UK about the documentary which follows real North Korean defectors and their escape from the dictatorship
Beyond Utopia director Madeleine Gavin found some parts of filming the documentary "agonising", namely following North Korean defector Soyeon Lee's struggle over her son's attempted escape and capture she tells Yahoo UK.
Lee defected to South Korea years earlier, telling her son -who was then a child- that she was going to go across the border to China in order to sell goods on the black market and help earn some money, but actually took the opportunity to defect with the hope of bringing him with her at a later date.
In the documentary the camera follows as Lee discovers her son is attempting to defect, is captured, and then interrogated under torture before being sent to a political prison camp, where he is now. Filming with Lee during this time was particularly difficult, Gavin says.
"Following Soyeon's story was one of the most difficult experiences of my life," the filmmaker reflects.
"We were with her through periods of hope and heartbreak and this was not a short journey. This was well over a year of painstaking effort to get any accurate information out of North Korea.
"It was agonising. But the commitment we all, as filmmakers and subjects, had made to each other when we began this, is that we would bear witness and be there for each other no matter what."Madeleine Gavin
How Beyond Utopia came to be
Beyond Utopia began life as a biopic for Heyonseo Lee, the North Korean defector who wrote the critically-acclaimed memoir The Girl with Seven Names, but when Gavin was approached she knew she wanted to do something different.
"I didn't know that I was the right person to make this movie because, for me, I felt if I were to do anything that I do I want to have a strong personal connection to it, and feel also like I'm contributing something," Gavin explains.
"[Like] there's a reason for me to be doing this as opposed to anyone else, and that actually started me on the path of research because my producer said 'just read her book'.
"I read [Hyeonsoo Lee's] book. It was beautiful, it was haunting, and it opened my eyes to North Korea because I've never read anything like that.
"What it really did, though, was spark my curiosity, and that's when I started to read everything and I went into months of research. Barbara Demick's book [Nothing to Envy] was one of the key ones, but I read everything I get my hands on."
It was through her research that Gavin came to learn of Pastor Kim, a North Korean defector who founded an underground network to help his fellow countrymen escape and find freedom, and who has also helped smuggle hidden cameras into the country so that footage of what the regime are doing can be seen by the outside world.
"Pastor Kim and I had to get to know each other for many months because he's been approached by so many filmmakers and networks, and he's very protective of the people he helps and of his very vast network, as he should be."Madeleine Gavin
"But at a certain point we just came to really trust each other and also to feel like we really wanted to do the same thing. We had the same ideas of what was important and what we would want this film to be."
Gavin adds: "We decided to work together and... we knew we wanted to follow two escapes. I mean, three would have been more prudent, but we couldn't do everything so that was our decision. That was our mandate. The next two groups who contacted Pastor Kim were the two stories in the film."
Filming the escapes
As well as following Lee's experience, the film charts the escape of the Ro family —consisting of five people, a father, mother, grandmother and two girls— from China to South Korea, a perilous journey that took them through Laos, Vietnam and Thailand.
It is also the first time in which anyone has been able to document North Korean defectors before they have made it to South Korea, and been put through the programme the country has to help teach them about the outside world and undo the indoctrination of the Kim regime.
In the case of the Ro family, the grandmother of the group shared her surprise when upon meeting Americans like Gavin they weren't immediately intent on killing her — as North Koreans are taught.
"We met the Ro family a few weeks after they literally fled across the river from North Korea to China, and most of the weeks that they had spent in China they were hiding on Changbai Mountain in a hut," Gavin reflected.
"So really we met them just days after they had left the border of North Korea and [got into] China, and that was the most amazing experience."Madeleine Gavin
"The grandma of the family, she still firmly believed in Kim Jong-un, she would talk for hours about [how] her biggest regret in life was that she was not allowed by the regime to join the Communist Party.
"She felt tremendous guilt for having left with her daughter, she felt that she had abandoned Kim Jong-un. This woman for 80 years has believed all of this, she also for 80 years had believed that North Korea is the centre of the universe, that they were the most important country in the universe.
"Yes, life may be difficult, but it's way worse everywhere else. So they are actually lucky to be living where they are, and Americans are the worst people in the world.
"Not only that, they only exist to make North Koreans unhappy. We basically don't exist as human beings, our only goal is to hurt and kill these pure people, because there's this whole mythology about the pure North Korean race that the Kim regime problem propagates.
"So, with her, to have her have these 80 years of firm beliefs —not just beliefs she knew these things to be true— and then to be experiencing the outside world where she was seeing showers and toilets, and greenery, and then to be meeting Americans and having like a simpatico and finding that we actually connected, it was mind-blowing."
Gavin adds: "And it was mind blowing to witness that peeling of the onion of what she's always known to be true versus what she's experiencing personally, and the evolution of how she dealt with those really competing experiences."
Hope for the future
Gavin also spoke about the way in which she hopes the documentary will help change perceptions of North Korea, and its people who are "unseen and unheard" in the public sphere.
"When we hear about North Korea, we hear about the nukes and the "Dear Leader" and the pageantry, but rarely do we hear about the actual people who live inside that country," the director says.
"My hope is that the empathy audiences feel for the subjects in our film will extend to the 26 million other North Koreans who are cut off, shrouded inside the walls of that country - unseen and unheard - and who desperately need our attention, our advocacy and our help."
Beyond Utopia is out in cinemas now.
Read more
North Korean defector Pastor Kim reveals the struggle to help others escape since COVID
Beyond Utopia review – nail-biting account of how to get out of North Korea (The Guardian, 3-min read)
Watch the trailer for Beyond Utopia:
