North Korea. Your house is on fire. What do you try to rescue first? Your kids? Your pet? No, the first thing you reach for is the portrait of the Dear Leader, Kim Jong-un and his father and grandfather that is hanging on your wall, as mandated by the authoritarian government.
Everything else can wait. Such is the bizarre and grim reality of North Korea that emerges in Beyond Utopia, the award-winning documentary directed by Madeleine Gavin.
She obtained remarkable footage surreptitiously recorded in the secretive, isolated state that shows what life is truly like for ordinary people – people told from birth that their leader is a human god who demands and deserves total fealty.
Despite the North Korean regime’s attempts to brainwash the populace into believing they live in an earthly paradise, over a period of years hundreds of thousands of people have risked death to try to escape.
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