SEOUL TRAIN

D: Jim Butterworth, Aaron Lubarsky

Documentary Feature Spotlight

While broad in scope and slightly unfocused, this human rights documentary sheds light on an atrocity that has otherwise been ignored by the world community: the slow, societal suffering of the people in North Korea. Seoul Train diagrams a number of tragic refugee stories of those who bravely escaped their country with hopes of amnesty in Mongolia, only to be returned by a seemingly unsympathetic Chinese government to death camps in their homeland’s brutal dictatorship. Editor Lubarsky skillfully sews heart-wrenching found footage of the most well-known refugee cases around interviews with American and European political activists for the freedom of the people of North Korea. The feckless United Nations is also indicted for their lack of confrontation, adding to the grandiose political scope of this film. Most impressive is the fact that the threat of nuclear weapons isn’t mentioned once in the 54-minute documentary: The brutality alone of Kim Jong Il’s regime should inspire the world to take action.

This article appears in March 25 • 2005.

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