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VIRAL EXCLUSIVE
Jan. 30, 2024
The Uncertain Road of North Korean Doc Beyond Utopia
A behind-the-scenes perspective of Beyond Utopia, which was supposed to be a complete contrast to the final version which won the US documentary audience award at Sundance 2023. By: Dylan Low
Jana
Edelbeum, Managing Partner of iDeal Partners, first approached film director
Madeleine Gavin to adapt The Girl with Seven Names – a 2015 memoir by Hyeonseo
Lee, into a film. While she initially had no interest in doing a biopic of Lee,
she could not refuse the offer after learning more about the story.
“I
dug deep into the dark web for months and I became obsessed,” stated Gavin on
how the film originated. “When I started to see the footage that was secretly
filmed by North Koreans and saw the reality of their lives, I realised how much
the rest of the world doesn’t see. I felt we had to do something present tense
and up close and personal. I wanted to follow an escape.”
Encountering Seungeun Kim, a South Korean pastor who
helms one of the most active churches involved in helping defectors, was an
important factor. “It took many months to get to know and trust each other,”
stated the director. “Pastor Kim is very protective of his network, but we
[both] wanted to bring the outside world up close to North Koreans. We decided
to follow the next two escapes he was going to help facilitate.”
The
movie highlights these two escape stories, one about the Roh family of five who
entered the border into China and guided by Pastor Kim’s connections of brokers
and safe houses, navigate through jungles and mountains to Vietnam, Laos and
situated safely in Thailand. The second escape is narrated by Soyeon Lee, who
is a defector and activist in Seoul, attempting to find the 17-year-old son she
left behind as a child a decade ago.
It
was a risky and unknown experience for Gavin, who first debuted as a director
in 2016 (City of Joy). “While we were shooting, we didn’t know how the
story was going to end,” Gavin mentioned. It was a similar case for Soyeon Lee,
as the filming did not know if the Roh family or Soyeon would give their
consent. “She knew she could say no at any point,” says the filmmaker.
“We were filming with her right up to the final lock and we never knew if she
would get some information about her son that would change her mind. This meant
that I was editing two versions of the film, one with Soyeon and one without.”
The
highly acclaimed film impacted audiences through its heart-wrenching moments,
one being Roh family’s grandmother shedding tears as she talked about the
“Great Leader Kim Jong-un” before finding out the government had lied to her
the entire time.
“Mostly
non-North Koreans meet defectors after they have gone through the assimilation
process,” Gavin explained. “One of the extraordinary things about this
experience is that we met the Roh family so soon after they left North Korea,
as they were first experiencing the outside world. Witnessing grandma grapple
with what she has known to be true for 80 years vis-à-vis what she was experiencing
in the present was remarkable.”
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