{"id":543180,"date":"2023-01-24T18:28:08","date_gmt":"2023-01-24T15:28:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/watch-beyond-utopia-review-a-staggering-look-at-escaping-north-korea\/"},"modified":"2023-01-24T18:28:08","modified_gmt":"2023-01-24T15:28:08","slug":"watch-beyond-utopia-review-a-staggering-look-at-escaping-north-korea","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/watch-beyond-utopia-review-a-staggering-look-at-escaping-north-korea\/","title":{"rendered":"Watch &#8216;Beyond Utopia&#8217; Review: A Staggering Look at Escaping North Korea"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"ez-toc-container\" class=\"ez-toc-v2_0_85 counter-hierarchy ez-toc-counter ez-toc-custom ez-toc-container-direction\">\n<p class=\"ez-toc-title\" style=\"cursor:inherit\">Table of Contents<\/p>\n<label for=\"ez-toc-cssicon-toggle-item-6a373cda84b2e\" class=\"ez-toc-cssicon-toggle-label\"><span class=\"\"><span class=\"eztoc-hide\" style=\"display:none;\">Toggle<\/span><span class=\"ez-toc-icon-toggle-span\"><svg style=\"fill: #dd3333;color:#dd3333\" xmlns=\"http:\/\/www.w3.org\/2000\/svg\" class=\"list-377408\" width=\"20px\" height=\"20px\" viewBox=\"0 0 24 24\" fill=\"none\"><path d=\"M6 6H4v2h2V6zm14 0H8v2h12V6zM4 11h2v2H4v-2zm16 0H8v2h12v-2zM4 16h2v2H4v-2zm16 0H8v2h12v-2z\" fill=\"currentColor\"><\/path><\/svg><svg style=\"fill: #dd3333;color:#dd3333\" class=\"arrow-unsorted-368013\" xmlns=\"http:\/\/www.w3.org\/2000\/svg\" width=\"10px\" height=\"10px\" viewBox=\"0 0 24 24\" version=\"1.2\" baseProfile=\"tiny\"><path d=\"M18.2 9.3l-6.2-6.3-6.2 6.3c-.2.2-.3.4-.3.7s.1.5.3.7c.2.2.4.3.7.3h11c.3 0 .5-.1.7-.3.2-.2.3-.5.3-.7s-.1-.5-.3-.7zM5.8 14.7l6.2 6.3 6.2-6.3c.2-.2.3-.5.3-.7s-.1-.5-.3-.7c-.2-.2-.4-.3-.7-.3h-11c-.3 0-.5.1-.7.3-.2.2-.3.5-.3.7s.1.5.3.7z\"\/><\/svg><\/span><\/span><\/label><input type=\"checkbox\"  id=\"ez-toc-cssicon-toggle-item-6a373cda84b2e\" checked aria-label=\"Toggle\" \/><nav><ul class='ez-toc-list ez-toc-list-level-1 ' ><li class='ez-toc-page-1 ez-toc-heading-level-1'><a class=\"ez-toc-link ez-toc-heading-1\" href=\"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/watch-beyond-utopia-review-a-staggering-look-at-escaping-north-korea\/#%E2%80%9CWatch_Online_%E2%80%98Beyond_Utopia_Review_A_Staggering_Look_at_Escaping_North_Korea%E2%80%9D\" >&#8220;Watch Online &#8216;Beyond Utopia&#8217; Review: A Staggering Look at Escaping North Korea&#8221;<\/a><ul class='ez-toc-list-level-2' ><li class='ez-toc-heading-level-2'><a class=\"ez-toc-link ez-toc-heading-2\" href=\"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/watch-beyond-utopia-review-a-staggering-look-at-escaping-north-korea\/#%E2%80%9C%E2%80%98Beyond_Utopia_Review_A_Staggering_Look_at_Escaping_North_Korea%E2%80%9D\" >&#8220;&#8216;Beyond Utopia&#8217; Review: A Staggering Look at Escaping North Korea&#8221;<\/a><\/li><\/ul><\/li><\/ul><\/nav><\/div>\n<h1><span class=\"ez-toc-section\" id=\"%E2%80%9CWatch_Online_%E2%80%98Beyond_Utopia_Review_A_Staggering_Look_at_Escaping_North_Korea%E2%80%9D\"><\/span>&#8220;Watch Online &#8216;Beyond Utopia&#8217; Review: A Staggering Look at Escaping North Korea&#8221;<span class=\"ez-toc-section-end\"><\/span><\/h1>\n<h2><span class=\"ez-toc-section\" id=\"%E2%80%9C%E2%80%98Beyond_Utopia_Review_A_Staggering_Look_at_Escaping_North_Korea%E2%80%9D\"><\/span>&#8220;&#8216;Beyond Utopia&#8217; Review: A Staggering Look at Escaping North Korea&#8221;<span class=\"ez-toc-section-end\"><\/span><\/h2>\n<div>\n<p class=\"paragraph larva \/\/ lrv-u-margin-lr-auto  lrv-a-font-body-m   \">\n    North Korea is a place of fearsome fascination. It\u2019s the most brutal regime on earth, led by a dynastic dictator, Kim Jong-un, who has proved to be even more ruthless and obsessed with nuclear weapons than his father, Kim Jong-il. We all have a certain vision of North Korea, a country sealed like a prison, cut off from the rest of the world by <a href=\"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/category\/technology\/\" data-internallinksmanager029f6b8e52c=\"4\" title=\"Technology\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">technology<\/a> (or the absence of it). You could say it exists as a kind of ghost state, a totalitarian hellhole in lockdown. But when you watch Madeleine Gavin\u2019s staggering documentary \u201cBeyond Utopia,\u201d which is about what really goes on in North Korea, and about a handful of desperate souls who attempt to defect from it, you see North Korea \u2014 the full nightmare of the place \u2014 as never before.<\/p>\n<p class=\"paragraph larva \/\/ lrv-u-margin-lr-auto  lrv-a-font-body-m   \">\n    The filmmaker got ahold of forbidden footage that was smuggled out of the country, and in that footage we see citizens lined up to watch a public execution; then we see the execution. We see North Koreans who\u2019ve gotten in trouble with the regime \u2014 which one man did just for tearing off a piece of <a href=\"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/category\/news\/\" data-internallinksmanager029f6b8e52c=\"2\" title=\"News\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">news<\/a>paper with Kim Jong-un\u2019s image on it so that he could roll a cigarette \u2014 locked in interrogation rooms, getting savagely beaten and tortured. We hear about what h<a href=\"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/category\/download-scripts-themes-apps\/\" data-internallinksmanager029f6b8e52c=\"9\" title=\"Download Scripts &amp; Themes &amp; Apps\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">app<\/a>ens to the ones who receive the worst sentences. They\u2019re \u201cbanished,\u201d by being deposited in the wilderness, or incarcerated in one of the gulags, otherwise known as a concentration camp. That last phrase is, of course, a loaded one, and \u201cBeyond Utopia\u201d makes the reference explicit by claiming that North Korea is a cult state of such relentless terror that the only country it\u2019s comparable to is Nazi Germany.<\/p>\n<p class=\"paragraph larva \/\/ lrv-u-margin-lr-auto  lrv-a-font-body-m   \">\n    As a profile of the glum dystopia of North Korea (one state newspaper, one state TV channel, apartments without elevators where the tenants burn wood, hole-in-the-ground outhouses, human waste gathered by the government to fertilize farms, citizens encouraged to spy on other citizens), \u201cBeyond Utopia\u201d has a quotidian terror. It peeks behind the Potemkin-village fa\u00e7ade that, for too long, is all that we\u2019ve really been able to see of North Korea. But the film also chronicles, with footage shot on a cell phone, the attempt by five members of a family to leave this bad dream of a nation, and their escape story has a scary, suck-in-your-breath suspense.<\/p>\n<p class=\"paragraph larva \/\/ lrv-u-margin-lr-auto  lrv-a-font-body-m   \">\n    The documentary\u2019s central figure is Pastor Seungeun Kim, a gentle smiling South Korean Christian who himself defected from North Korea years ago. In the last 10 years, he has helped 1,000 people to escape, risking his own safety. He emerges as a figure of benevolent fearlessness, and a master strategist, as he arranges the escape plan that guides the Roh family. <\/p>\n<p class=\"paragraph larva \/\/ lrv-u-margin-lr-auto  lrv-a-font-body-m   \">\n    The DMZ that separates North and South Korea is rigged with two million land mines. Today, if you want to escape, your only choice is to cross the Yula River into China, then make it through Vietnam and Laos. All of them are Communist countries that, if you\u2019re apprehended, will return you to North Korea. The promised land is Thailand, on the other side of Laos. Thailand is not Communist; if you get there, you\u2019re free. But to make it, the defectors must embark on a treacherous journey, <a href=\"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/category\/trip-and-travel\/\" data-internallinksmanager029f6b8e52c=\"10\" title=\"Trip &amp; Travel\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">travel<\/a>ing on foot through jungles and over mountains, with the aid of brokers who do it for the money and have no interest in whether the desperate people who are paying them make it to their destination.<\/p>\n<p class=\"paragraph larva \/\/ lrv-u-margin-lr-auto  lrv-a-font-body-m   \">\n    Usually, when refugees flee an oppressive regime, they know what they\u2019re leaving behind; they can taste the freedom they\u2019re searching for. But part of the story \u201cBeyond Utopia\u201d tells is that the citizens of North Korea don\u2019t fully understand how oppressed they are. They can\u2019t; they\u2019ve never seen any other way of being. In that sense, apart from Nazi Germany, the country that North Korea most resembles is Mao\u2019s China during the insanity of the Cultural Revolution and the Great Leap Forward. Tens of millions of people died in China from famine, due to Mao\u2019s disastrously unhinged economic policies. In the aftermath, partly to cover all that up, China became the first National Propaganda <a href=\"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/category\/social-mediaa\/\" data-internallinksmanager029f6b8e52c=\"1\" title=\"Social Media\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Media<\/a> State, subjecting its vast populace to a daily brainwashing, with Mao held up as a living deity.<\/p>\n<p class=\"paragraph larva \/\/ lrv-u-margin-lr-auto  lrv-a-font-body-m   \">\n    The North Korean regime, in many ways a depraved outgrowth of Maoism, goes even further. As the film shows us, it has taken its made-up theology from the Bible, with Kim Jong-un portrayed as a Christ figure, and we see footage of the great mass stadium exhibitions that the citizens, including thousands of schoolchildren, rehearse for a year at a time \u2014 displays that look like the opening ceremony of the Olympics staged on a mile-wide electronic billboard in which every LED light is a choreographed human being. All of this loony-tunes spectacle is meant to celebrate the \u201cutopia\u201d of North Korea, with the outside world, especially America, portrayed as such a demonic place that the only word used to refer to someone in the U.S. is \u201cAmerican-bastard.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"paragraph larva \/\/ lrv-u-margin-lr-auto  lrv-a-font-body-m   \">\n    The joyless suppression of life in North Korea prompts at least some citizens to suspect that a better life must lay on the other side. The family of defectors in \u201cBeyond Utopia\u201d are like that; they\u2019re ordinary people who have put themselves on a moving mission. We also follow the saga of Soyeon Lee, who defected from North Korea and is now trying to get her 17-year-old son to do the same. The Roh family members (mother, father, two young daughters, 80-year-old grandma) are guided by Pastor Kim, who arranges to meet up with them in China; they make the journey step by perilous step. Lee\u2019s son isn\u2019t so lucky. He\u2019s detained by the authorities, tortured, and sent to a gulag. We see a photograph of a doleful handsome high schooler, and it\u2019s a surreal horror to imagine what has happened to him. At moments, his mother\u2019s torment is almost too much to bear.<\/p>\n<p class=\"paragraph larva \/\/ lrv-u-margin-lr-auto  lrv-a-font-body-m   \">\n    North Korea wasn\u2019t always as horrific as it is now. Before the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia helped to subsidize the country, and for years it was stronger economically than China, held up in some quarters as a shining example of how Communism could \u201cwork.\u201d But the country was gutted by the Soviet downfall. The famine that happened killed 3 million citizens, and Kim Jong-il commenced the strategy of using nuclear weapons as both a threat and a diversionary tactic, a way of getting the West to forget about the country\u2019s human-rights violations. It worked. The weapons, now with the mobster-autocrat Kim Jong-un in charge, get all the attention. Of course, the West is right to treat any nuclear threat with sober caution. But what we\u2019ve forgotten about, for too long, is the North Korean people. For years, their misery has existed under a blackout. \u201cBeyond Utopia\u201d looks behind the wall and shines a light.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<p><script type=\"text\/javascript\" class=\"optanon-category-C0004\">\n  !function(f, b, e, v, n, t, s) {\n    if (f.fbq) return;\n    n = f.fbq = function() {\n      n.callMethod ?\n          n.callMethod.apply(n, arguments) : n.queue.push(arguments);\n    };\n    if (!f._fbq) f._fbq = n;\n    n.push = n;\n    n.loaded = !0;\n    n.version = '2.0';\n    n.queue = [];\n    t = b.createElement(e);\n    t.async = !0;\n    t.src = v;\n    s = b.getElementsByTagName(e)[0];\n    s.parentNode.insertBefore(t, s);\n  }(window, document, 'script',\n      'https:\/\/connect.facebook.net\/en_US\/fbevents.js');\n  fbq('init', '586935388485447');\n  fbq('init', '315552255725686');\n  fbq('track', 'PageView');\n<\/script><\/p>\n<blockquote><p><strong><span style=\"color: #ff6600;\">If you liked the article, do not forget to share it with your friends. Follow us on\u00a0<span style=\"color: #ff0000;\"><a style=\"color: #ff0000;\" href=\"https:\/\/news.google.com\/publications\/CAAqBwgKMLG0nwswvr63Aw\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener noreferrer\">Google News<\/a><\/span>\u00a0too, click on the star and choose us from your favorites.<\/span><\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<blockquote>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">For forums sites go to <span style=\"color: #ff9900;\"><a style=\"color: #ff9900;\" href=\"https:\/\/forum.buradabiliyorum.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Forum.BuradaBiliyorum.Com<\/a><\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<blockquote>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><strong>If you want to read more Like this articles, you can visit our <span style=\"color: #ff9900;\"><a style=\"color: #ff9900;\" href=\"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/watch-movies-tv-series\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Watch Movies &#038; TV Series <\/a><\/span>category<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p><span style=\"color: black;\"><a style=\"color: #ff9900;\" href=\"https:\/\/variety.com\/2023\/film\/reviews\/beyond-utopia-review-1235499970\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Source<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&#8220;Watch Online &#8216;Beyond Utopia&#8217; Review: A Staggering Look at Escaping North Korea&#8221; &#8220;&#8216;Beyond Utopia&#8217; Review: A Staggering Look at Escaping North Korea&#8221; North Korea is a place of fearsome fascination. It\u2019s the most brutal regime on earth, led by a dynastic dictator, Kim Jong-un, who has proved to be even more ruthless and obsessed with&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":543181,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/variety.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/01\/1388810_beyondutopia_101685.jpg?w=480&h=320&crop=1","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-543180","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-watch-movies-tv-seriess"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/543180","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=543180"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/543180\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/543181"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=543180"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=543180"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=543180"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}