As the Emmy Award-winning director Alan Berliner’s new film BENITA (2025) comes to Bertha DocHouse, we take a look back on his impressive catalogue of films and bring Letter To The Editor (2019) back to the cinema screen.
Berliner’s extensive career has gained him recognition as “America’s foremost cinematic essayist” by the San Francisco International Film Festival and “the modern master of personal documentary filmmaking” by the Florida Film Festival. He is an obsessive collector of images making stories out of archival material, found footage, home movies, newspapers and family photo albums.
By making meaning out of visual association, Berliner often turns to the biographical and his family history as a key to unlock universal experiences and systems of knowledge. Berliner is considered the virtuoso of essayistic documentary, replacing traditional journalistic objectivity with subjective, argumentative explorations of memory, inheritance, identity and time.
BENITA / dir. Alan Berliner / 2025 / 82 min
Berliner’s latest documentary BENITA is another familial portrait of his fellow New Yorker experimental documentary filmmaker Benita Raphan. During the Covid pandemic Benita struggled with mental health and took her own life. As her creative mentor, Benita’s family asked Berliner to finish off her current film project ‘Canine Cognition’ offering him her personal archive of notebooks, journals, letters and the miscellaneous material that filled 40 hard drives.
Although this isn’t the film Benita had set out to make, Berliner often works from personal archives to craft his documentaries and naturally discovered a story within her words and videos. The intimate portrait of this playfully spirited artist articulates how mental health and creativity interact, giving Benita’s story a universal resonance and an enduring legacy in the light of her death.
⭐⭐⭐⭐ “A compelling and engaging intimate portrait of an artist whose life was tragically cut short.” – Screen Radar
The UK Premiere of BENITA will be on Wed 24 Jun followed by a Q&A with Alan Berliner himself. Book tickets here.
Letter to the Editor / dir. Alan Berliner / 2019 / 88 min
Once labelling himself as a “cultural anthropologist,” Berliner is a filmmaker who often reflects on how the media and the meaning of the image shapes cultural values and interests. Letter to the Editor is an essayistic documentary entirely made from New York Times photograph clippings. With print media being another obsession of his, Berliner has cut, collected and catalogued 40 years’ worth of images from the newspaper.
Unlike his previous films that study personal relationships (his father in Nobody’s Business, his grandfather in Intimate Stranger, and the poet Edwin Honig, who was his First Cousin, Once Removed), Letter to the Editor is his most outwardly thinking film, touching on major historical events of the 20th and 21st century. With equal measures of whimsy and seriousness the film explores the decline of print media in the new digital media era and Berliner poetically reflects on the New York Times and what print media means historically, politically and to him personally. Despite its release date in 2019, Letter to the Editor was caught up in disputes over rights and never made its way to a UK audience.
“Alan Berliner delivers a masterfully assembled all-archival opus for the era of #FakeNews” – TIFF
The UK Premiere of Letter to the Editor will be playing at DocHouse on Sat 27 Jun followed by a Q&A with Alan Berliner. Book tickets here.
First Cousin Once Removed / dir. Alan Berliner / 2012 / 78 min
First Cousin Once Removed is an intimate portrait of the poet Edwin Honig, who is Berliner’s close friend and cousin. This film documents Honig’s journey with Alzheimer’s disease, offering a thoughtful essay on memory and its profound role to determine our identity.
Back in 2013 Alan Berliner joined Bertha DocHouse to present this film in London for the first time giving a masterclass on his filmmaking approach.
The masterclass with Alan Berliner can be watched here.