Mick Hartley

The trailer:

Ian Birrell at UnHerd:

When Kim Seungeun first visited North Korea, he saw a barren land devastated by famine, its trees stripped by people desperate to heat their homes. He can still picture the corpses floating down the Tumen River on its border with the South. “Sometimes there was just one body, sometimes two or three,” he told me. “They’d probably all starved to death.”

Kim watched in horror as people on both banks poked the corpses with poles until they burst and sank beneath its waters, rather than bother to retrieve them. Then came the pivotal event in his life. A stick-thin child — a boy of about seven, malnourished and driven by grinding hunger to cross the swirling river despite the bodies — begged him for help. “I fell to my knees, crying so many tears, and promised God to devote my life to helping these people,” said Kim.

The nightmare he witnessed on his volunteer church mission at the turn of the century could not be more different from the portrait painted by his grandfather. Growing up in a small South Korean fishing village, Kim was frequently regaled with tales of the beautiful mountains, rivers and women seen in the north before their country was sliced in half following the Second World War. Three decades later, this romantic image had been shattered.

After his epiphany, Kim became a Christian pastor and devoted himself and his Caleb Mission to saving North Korean citizens from the clutches of the Hermit Kingdom. When we met earlier this year, I asked how many people he has helped to flee using his clandestine routes that rely on bribery, smugglers, subterfuge and safe houses. “1,008,” he replied with a smile.

This, despite the fact that anyone caught escaping North Korea risks torture, public execution or being sent to a slave labour camp for life with their entire family. Now his work is being highlighted in Beyond Utopia, a gripping new documentary that features astonishing footage of one family’s flight to freedom shot on their mobile phones. At one point, the mother, hiding beside her weeping young daughters after crossing a border river, is shown on a video call pleading for salvation. “Please help us live,” she begs him. Later, this family of five, which includes a grandmother aged 83, are seen dodging officials and wearily scrambling through the mountains, rivers and jungles of four nations to safety in South Korea. They all carried suicide pills to swallow if caught….