(RNS) — For Pastor Seungeun Kim, accompanying North Korean defectors as they trek toward freedom through the jungle between Vietnam and Laos is, as he put it, “just going to work.”
“People are shocked about this rescue mission, but for me that’s part of my breakfast, lunch and dinner, morning, day and night,” Kim said in an interview conducted in Korean via translator. “It’s just regular life for me.”
Over the last 24 years, Kim estimates his organization, Caleb Mission, has helped rescue over 1,000 defectors from North Korea — in fact, he told RNS, he was in the jungle assisting defectors just days ago. But for many viewers of the new documentary, “Beyond Utopia,” now streaming on platforms including Amazon Prime and Apple TV, the footage of Kim’s rescue missions is extraordinary.
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There’s the video of the Roh family huddled in a shack on China’s Changbai Mountain, begging Kim to provide resources for their escape. There’s the footage of the family scrambling through the jungle on foot, at night, led by brokers demanding more money. There’s the interview with the family in a safehouse, still recovering from years of North Korean propaganda, praising Kim Jong Un even while fleeing his government.
For director Madeleine Gavin — whose last project, “City of Joy,” documented women leaders in the Democratic Republic of the Congo — acknowledging the people of North Korea and hearing their stories is long overdue.
“I had to do it in a way that is up close and personal that really forces us to acknowledge people who we’ve ignored for such a long time,” Gavin told RNS.
During a trip to South Korea in 2019 to scope out ideas for a film on North Korea, Gavin met Kim, who told RNS he eventually agreed to the documentary “in order to help the people who are suffering from human rights abuses.”
That group includes the Roh family, who, around the time filming started in 2019, were informed they would be banished to an unlivable territory in North Korea for having relatives who had recently defected. The family of five fled across a river into China, where, through a series of chance encounters, they learned of Kim. The pastor mobilized his underground network and met the family in Vietnam, along with Gavin and a small film crew that captured the group’s escape through Vietnam, Laos and to the border of Thailand.
