News

Madeleine Gavin’s Sundance award-winning documentary “Beyond Utopia” has garnered the best documentary and best doc editing honors at the 24th annual Woodstock Film Festival.

The documentary, which was recently acquired by Roadside Attractions, is vying for Academy Award attention.

Using hidden camera footage, the doc follows the high-stakes journey that a handful of desperate families make in order to defect from North Korea — a country with the most brutal regime on earth, led by a dictator, Kim Jong-un.

Doc jurors included directors Barbara Kopple (“Harlan County USA”) Richard Rowley (“ Kingdom of Silence”) and Heidi Ewing (“Jesus Camp”).

“This year’s winner is an astonishingly intimate, white-knuckle thriller following families trying to escape North Korea,” the jurors said in a joint statement. “Stitched together from raw, first person footage, it is impossible not to feel the heart-breaking courage as a family clings to each other during a nighttime crossing of the Mekong River.

In “The Same Storm,” it’s a welcome surprise to see Elaine May appear as one of the faces in writer-director Peter Hedges’ impressively diverse and starry ensemble, who take turns contributing scenes about the challenges of life during lockdown. May portrays spiky Ruth Lipsman Berg, who hops on a teleconference with a new doctor and her home health aide. Daphne Rubin-Vega is Lupe, her concerned caregiver. Raza Jaffrey is the gentle but quite-clear physician trying to ascertain if Ruth has contracted the coronavirus.

Ruth was in the scene right before this one — talking with her daughter, a webcam girl — so we’re aware she’s gotten dolled up for the doctor’s call. Like a good Jewish mother, she asked the doc if he’s single. If so, she has a daughter. Forget that in the prior scene, her call to said daughter (Mary-Louise Parker) was less than kind.