When US filmmaker and editor Madeleine Gavin was first approached about making a film on North Korea, she was initially very reluctant to become involved. The producers had secured the rights to The Girl With Seven Names, the memoir by Hyeonseo Lee, one of the most high profile North Korean defectors, and wanted her aboard.
“If I couldn’t contribute something specific to me to the project, I didn’t think I should be the one doing it,” Gavin remembers her reaction. She read the book and found it fascinating but didn’t want to make a biopic. Lee had escaped North Korea in 1999 and was then stranded in China for 10 years but “it was all in the past.”
Gavin finally agreed to take on the assignment but she was determined to broaden its scope and tell a more contemporary story.
For months, the director did her own research on North Korea, reading everything she could, using VPNs to dig deep into the web, exploring North Korean propaganda and also turning up some truly terrifying video material of executions and torture.
“The more research I did, the more I realised there was literally nothing about the people of North Korea,” Gavin notes.
Apart from one or two books, among them Barbara Demich’s “absolutely brilliant” Nothing To Envy, she found that very little attention had been paid by writers and filmmakers to the ongoing suffering of the North Korean population.
Beyond Utopia, the film Gavin went on to make, features Hyeonseo Lee as an interviewee but, as its opening inter titles proclaim, its real subject is “people attempting to escape from one of the most dangerous countries on earth.”
The director started meeting defectors in South Korea and eventually also ran across her main protagonist, Pastor Seungeun Kim, a heroic figure who has helped thousands of North Koreans to escape their homeland.
“He [the Pastor] is very, very protective not only of his network but also the people he tried to help escape,” Gavin notes of him. “The process of getting to know him was another period of many, many months.”
The Pastor is a deceptive figure. He’s cheery and good natured but, as the film reveals, he carries a very heavy load. He has suffered horrific injuries in his work helping defectors across the border. The Pastor is a wanted man too. He has been shot at by the police. North Korean leader Kim Jong-un’s henchmen have threatened to kidnap him.
“I met his wife early on. He has two daughters who are defectors and who he helped rescue and [then] adopted. And he has got a biological daughter as well. He talks in the film about his son who passed away. The more I got to know him, the more amazed I was by him,” Gavin says of her utterly fearless protagonist. “Pastor Kim is like the most amazing line producer in the world. Without him, we wouldn’t have got anything that we got. The more I got to know him, the more impressed I was.”
The Pastor has a huge network of contacts in China and North Korea. These range from brokers guiding people across the border purely for money to more idealistic figures, among them North Koreans who smuggle cameras into their homeland at huge personal risk. When the Pastor helps defectors, he always tries to go with them, often joining them during the most hair-raising parts of their journey.
The film follows the Roh family (including a grandmother and young kids) as they make an epic attempt to flee North Korea in 2019. It also profiles Soyeon Lee, a prominent defector in South Korea and human rights activist who hopes to bring her 17-year-old son across the border. (What she has gone through was unbearable,” Gavin says of the mother’s desperate attempts to engineer a reunion with her child whom she hasn’t seen for years.)
As the documentary points out, the lives of the North Koreans were very much better when the country was still propped up by the Soviet Union. Kim Il-Sung, the founder of North Korea, was genuinely loved. The ardent anti-Americanism was understandable given the suffering the country endured during the Korean war. However, after the Iron Curtain came down and the Soviet support stopped, the economy went into free fall. This was when the starvation and suffering began in earnest – and when the corpses began to turn up in the streets.
Gavin’s documentary, sold in North America by Submarine and internationally by Dogwoof, was rapturously received at Sundance in January. Pastor Kim, Soyeon Lee and the Roh family were all in attendance at the premiere. “Nobody had any idea they were there. The audiences were crying and we were crying,” Gavin says of the very emotional atmosphere at the premiere.
“The focus of the film is not the regime. It is the people. I’m sure the regime would rather not have a film like this out there but it’s not mocking Kim Jong-un at all. In fact, there are things about the film that he may even like,” the director suggests. “It’s important to wake up the rest of the world about the North Korean people because we have ignored 26 million people who are suffering badly.”
A version of this article was first published in March 2023.
