Benita
BENITA is Alan Berliner's intimate portrait of New York City filmmaker, Benita Raphan, who took her life by suicide in the middle of the Covid pandemic. Benita made several beautiful short films over the years -- including portraits of Emily Dickinson, John Nash, and Buckminster Fuller --exploring the relationship between mental health, innovation, and creativity.
Benita may not have left behind a suicide note, but Berliner patiently explored her personal archive, filled with films, out-takes, notebooks, drawings, photographs, home movies, and more than 40 hard drives, eventually making a surprising discovery that changed his understanding of Benita's life, her work, and her death.
Part anatomy of a suicide and part personal history of a life thrown off-balance by the extreme isolation of Covid, BENITA is the portrait of a filmmaker by a filmmaker that's also a film about filmmaking.
Alan Berliner
Emmy Award-winning filmmaker Alan Berliner is a virtuoso of essayistic documentary. His films are characterized by a first person perspective, playful use of archive materials, and inventive editing and sound design. His works include Letter to the Editor, an eclectic meditation on newspaper photography that played at DOC NYC; First Cousin, Once Removed, on a poet’s experience with Alzheimer’s disease, that was on the DOC NYC and Oscar short lists; Wide Awake about the director’s experiences with insomnia; The Sweetest Sound interviewing other people with the name Alan Berliner; Nobody’s Business profiling his father; Intimate Stranger profiling his maternal grandfather; and Family Album, a cinematic collage drawn from home movies.
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