Businessman-turned-documentarian Jim Butterworth makes movies with a message
Amid the media coverage following the March 2009 arrest by North Korea of journalists Laura Ling and Euna Lee, who were caught filming near the country’s border with China, Jim Butterworth, IE 84, appeared on an episode of Anderson Cooper 360.
As Butterworth described his experience visiting that same border in 2003, video footage of a gun-toting North Korean army patrol flashed across the screen. Butterworth didn’t appear in that video. He had been holding the camera, secretly shooting material for a documentary he directed, produced and screened on TV and at theaters across the world in a nearly three-year leave of absence from his business career.
Seoul Train, Butterworth’s first venture into filmmaking, follows the treacherous journey of North Korean refugees and the undercover activists of the Underground Railroad who risk their lives to smuggle them through China, a country that does not recognize them as refugees, to safety in Mongolia and South Korea.
In the opening scenes of the film, rare footage from inside North Korea is shown, horrifying images of the devastation of a country ravaged by years of famine. In one scene, two men stand knee-deep in the river and pull the limp body of a dead child out of the water. In another, a man pulls off his shirt, baring bruised, mutilated skin for the camera.
Butterworth doesn’t think of himself as a journalist. Yet in 2007, Seoul Train was a winner of the Alfred I. duPont Award, presented by Columbia University’s School of Journalism to the best in television and radio journalism and considered to be a broadcasting equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize.
This past year Butterworth teamed up with another award-winning documentary film producer to launch Naked Edge Films, a production company dedicated to helping documentary filmmakers fund, produce and market films about pressing social issues around the world.
When Butterworth spoke to the Alumni Magazine in mid-January, he was busy preparing for the Sundance premiere of To Catch a Dollar: Muhammad Yunus Banks on America. The film chronicles the work of Nobel Prize-winning economist Yunus to establish the first U.S. branch of Grameen Bank, an unconventional banking system he first developed in rural Bangladesh to make banking services available to poor women.
Butterworth said it’s the first of seven films Naked Edge has slated for release this year. In March, the company will premiere War Don Don, which follows the court trial of Issa Sesay, a former child soldier in the Revolutionary United Front who eventually took over as leader of the rebel force in Sierra Leone.
“He went to the government and laid down his arms and surrendered the RUF and brought peace to one of the bloodiest conflicts in human history,” Butterworth said. “But guess what the government did? They arrested him and put him on trial as a war criminal. … The central conflict is that he is probably guilty of a number of things that they accused him of. He’s also guilty of bringing peace to the country. And what do you do with a person like that?
“Our focus is all about telling stories that aren’t so black and white,” Butterworth said, “because life isn’t black and white, life is very gray. We’re really looking for those films that are gray because it’s out of the gray that you get critical discussion. And that critical discussion is how we move forward as a society.”
Butterworth said he sees Naked Edge Films bringing attention to and having an impact on a number of critical issues around the world.
“The one lesson that I took from Seoul Train is the incredible effect a film can have on a crisis,” he said. “If we can do five, 10 films a year, we can have a meaningful effect on five to 10 crises a year.”
It was 9/11 that first incited Butterworth to seek out something to do for the greater good. He was living in New York City at the time, just a few blocks from the World Trade Center. Ashes wafted through the windows of his apartment.
“I remember a few days later sitting in my place watching PBS’ Frontline,” he recalled. “There was a piece that came on that really tried to explain why we were under attack, what Al Qaeda was all about and how this mess came to happen. I remember thinking, ‘Aha, I get it. I understand.’ They really took me into the mind-set of those who attacked us. I was just blown away that a film, a documentary, could do that in such a short period of time, while I was sitting there smelling the burning fires from the Trade Center.”
Fast-forward to July 2003. By then, Butterworth had left New York and the venture capital firm he started for the ski slopes of Vail, Colo. He and a friend, Lisa Sleeth, attended a presentation by a New York Times reporter assigned to the North Korea beat. Butterworth recalled pulling aside the writer following his speech. That’s when he and Sleeth learned about the North Korean crisis and the nearly 2 million citizens who already had died of starvation.
“We were just two people in Vail, and we thought, ‘Let’s make a documentary and tell the world about this.’ It was a completely dumb idea, neither of us ever having touched a camcorder before. … My colleague was an ICU nurse in Vail. I have a business background. We thought, let’s just buy some cameras and some little spy cams, and let’s go over there and make this film. I think it was more ‘Jim and Lisa’s Big Adventure’ at that point, but then three months later we were on a plane,” Butterworth said.
The novices spent those three months familiarizing themselves with filming equipment and studying episodes of 60 Minutes to school themselves in interviewing skills and lighting techniques. They also got in contact with some of the Underground Railroad activists whom they later met in China. Butterworth and Sleeth earned the trust of those activists during the two months they spent filming in the region and came back to the states with some very precious cargo — additional video footage shot by activists and refugees themselves.
“Once they did that, the whole game changed,” Butterworth said. “We had this kind of solemn responsibility at that point to tell this story. And then from there, we had to do what we could to make this into a film that people would see.”
And people did see it. Since its premiere in November 2004, Seoul Train has been shown at hundreds of film festivals and community screenings, translated into about 20 languages and aired on television in about 25 countries and as part of PBS’ Independent Lens series.
Butterworth, who has an MBA from Dartmouth, turned his focus to his intellectual property and created Two-Way Media, the holding company for his numerous patents in audio- and video-streaming technologies for the Internet. He said his education and business background not only helped make Seoul Train possible financially but also helped him market the film and get it out to audiences.
“It’s like rolling out a new product. It’s a new business venture in and of itself. You have to market and sell and promote your film, or no one’s going to see it.”
Butterworth stresses that the documentary film business is not about making money. It’s about effecting change. It is hard to measure the effect Seoul Train has had on the crisis in North Korea, he said, but some strides have been made. For one, in 2004, the North Korean Human Rights Act was passed in Congress by a unanimous vote and signed into law by then-President George W. Bush.
“Similar legislation has been passed in other countries,” Butterworth said. “I’m not going to say that Seoul Train is responsible for it, but I will say Seoul Train was used to help educate those policymakers on what the issues were.”
Outreach efforts for Seoul Train included screenings for the Department of Defense, Council on Foreign Relations and European Parliament. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice all received copies of the film, as did North Korean leader Kim Jong-il and China’s vice foreign minister. Butterworth even toured college campuses and government organizations to speak on the subject.
More than five years after its release, Seoul Train still is used to educate people on the North Koreans’ plight. Butterworth said a student-run charity dedicated to North Korean human rights regularly screens the film on college campuses to recruit new members. Just this past fall, it was shown at about 300 colleges.
Butterworth said there were a number of “pinch-me” moments in his three-year Seoul Train ride. Among them was a July 2005 screening of the film for the foreign correspondents club of Tokyo that was hosted by The New York Times reporter who first told him about the North Korean crisis.
“Right before the lights went down and the film went on, he leaned over to me and said, ‘Jim, this film has dealt a real body blow to the crisis.’ It took my air away for him to say that. It was such a journey, but exactly two years later, here I was sitting in Tokyo showing the film with him,” Butterworth said. “I was just some guy who picked up a camcorder and filmed this story.”
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