revolutionary. one of the best, most informative, most harrowing, most important documentaries i've ever seen. using hidden camera footage, candid interviews, crucial historical context, and so much more, it thoroughly and bravely reveals truths about North Korea that the Kim regime has gone to great lengths to cover up. there is so little in-depth reporting about the relatively new country's atrocities because it's virtually impossible to get anything in or out, much less record. it's a minor miracle that these filmmakers pulled this off at all; the fact that it's masterfully made is just a bonus.

the film follows multiple Koreans' stories: an author reflects on her former life in North Korea, including the brainwashing, the torture, the cultural isolation,…

Okay so I'm about to say some really mean things about a documentary about people escaping North Korea. To be clear: not a North Korea fan, seems like a pretty fucked up place, I reckon! People should be, you know, allowed to leave it!

Even as a relatively historically illiterate person, this screamed to me as western propaganda. (I don't think one needs a history degree to know that America has a fun habit of fucking up a lot of countries all around the world.) There's time spent in the film on the propaganda fed to the people of North Korea, well, guess what: Western media feeds us lies about our history and system too.

One of the talking heads…

RESEÑA EN ESPAÑOL AQUI

Harrowing, gripping, moving, and genuinely enlightening from the very first frame to the end. By relying on real footage—no dramatizations, as the opening text makes clear—the film offers a clearer, more immediate understanding of life in North Korea, especially its darkest realities. Paired with what I’ve seen in My Brothers and Sisters in the North and the many North Korean-produced films floating around YouTube, it helps form a disturbingly coherent picture of what life there looks like. You also learn more about the history, including how the country’s head honcho seemingly presents himself as a Christ-like figure, which is… wild.

The rescue mission footage adds real tension—you never quite know how things will unfold—and visually, the…

📜 Documentaries 🏆 2023 Ranked 🏅 Top 100 Films

Beyond Utopia is essential viewing.

I don't recall ever having the chance to understand this viscerally what it is like escaping from—or even surviving in—North Korea.

Watching two families attempting to survive transit, we learn what it means to cross three hostile countries illegally while depending on charity workers who pay and collaborate with profit-oriented human traffickers (or "Brokers"). This is going to stay with me.

The moments of rest are brief, the safe houses look risky, there is little time between transit stages to recover physically, terrain is unsafe, and defectors are guaranteed to start off malnourished.

This would be a once-in-a-lifetime miserably difficult journey even without trying to escape,…

It's a little ironic to name your movie Beyond Utopia as a jab at the way North Korean propaganda pitches their country as when the image your painting of South Korean is suspiciously uncritical.

The film is so proud for showing all the nonsense and all the propaganda the party machine in North Korea pushes with a lot of screen time given to defectors telling you what they were told and how those things were obviously untrue. This creates an impression in your mind that indoctrination and transparent untruths are what propaganda is, but propaganda is far more multi-dimensional than that because what you don't say matters just as much as what you do say.

There's a heavy emphasis on…

There’s a moment in this movie where this whole Korean family has journeyed to the China/Korea border. They have traveled as a family and are barely surviving in the middle of the woods.

But they have so much farther to go. A trusted voice on the phone tells them that they have to journey through multiple countries. The land is treacherous. There are police on the lookout for defectors like them and the police are everywhere. If the family is  caught, in a best case scenario, they will likely be ransomed. In a worst case scenario they will be tortured and killed.

After the call is over, massive dangerous journey still ahead of them, the 80-year-old grandmother of the family…