Competition

BENITA

Alan Berliner

Country

USA

Year

2025

Length

81'

Category

Documentary

Premiere

Italian

Screenplay

Alan Berliner

Cinematography

Connor K. Smith, Benita Raphan, Andy Garrison

Editing

Alan Berliner

Music

Robert Miller, Pierre Foldes, Hayes Greenfield

Sound

Benita Raphan, Alan Berliner

Production

Experiments in Time, Light & Motion

Distribution

Experiments in Time, Light & Motion

Synopsis

In this deeply intimate and haunting documentary, Alan Berliner posthumously collaborates with his friend and colleague, NYC filmmaker Benita Raphan, who took her life by suicide during the Covid pandemic. Benita made several beautiful short films over the years — including portraits of Emily Dickinson, John Nash, Helen Keller, and Buckminster Fuller — exploring the relationship between mental health, innovation, and creativity.

Drawing from Benita’s personal archive — films, journals, drawings, photographs, home movies, and 40 hard drives — Berliner weaves the tapestry of an artist’s life, offering profound insights into the intersections of loneliness, inspiration, and human resilience.

Biography

Alan Berliner’s uncanny ability to combine experimental cinema, artistic purpose, and popular appeal in compelling film essays has made him one of America’s most acclaimed independent filmmakers. The New York Times has described Berliner’s work as “powerful, compelling and bittersweet… full of juicy conflict and contradiction, innovative in their cinematic technique, unpredictable in their structures… Alan Berliner illustrates the power of fine art to transform life.”

Statement

Like all my films, BENITA began as a hunch that quickly became a leap of faith and slowly evolved into a sustaining intuition over the four years it took to make. This is the 4th portrait I’ve made, each centered on a relatively unknown person that most people would agree is an unlikely candidate for biographical attention. Each of my portraits has been built upon a thorough excavation of my subject’s personal archive, which I use to try and tell a story that reckons with the poignancy and meaning of a life lived.

Benita may not have left a note when she took her life, but her archive was a kind of trail – what I call a “filmmaker’s trail” – filled with her films, out-takes, videos, photographs, sounds, music, notebooks, journals and enough digital material to fill 40 hard drives. I spent a year going through all of it – patiently, carefully, and diligently.

— Alan Berliner

Archival materials

Benita’s family gave me everything she left behind when she took her life: her films, out-takes, videos, photographs, sounds, music, notebooks, journals, drawings, credit cards, passports, correspondence, and enough digital material to fill 40 hard drives. By the end of the film, I had read everything Benita ever wrote, from her shopping lists to her personal journals to her ideas for films never made…

Extra

Poster

Trailer