Punto de Vista Festival
, Txinparta

  21 ABR
  12 H

Alan Berliner: Benita
United States, 2025, 81 min, DCP, English, original version with Spanish subtitles.

Benita Raphan’s family suggested to Alan Berliner that he consider finishing an unfinished short film by the late filmmaker, whom he had mentored and befriended. Unable to take on such a project, he proposed creating a posthumous portrait instead. The filmmaker left behind a body of work consisting of beautiful portraits of the poet Emily Dickinson, the mathematician John Nash, and the architect Buckminster Fuller, as well as a vast personal archive filled with outtakes, notebooks, drawings, photographs, home movies, and more than forty hard drives.

Berliner will tell us about Benita, but through the filmmaker’s own texts, sounds, and images, so that he himself can discover just how little we truly know about others. A master of constructing portraits, family explorations, and intimate narratives through a methodical and masterful reordering of the archive—Intimate Stranger (1991), Nobody’s Business (1996), Wide Awake (2006), First Cousin Once Removed (2012)—Berliner reflects, with more doubts than certainties, on personal stimuli and filmmaking, on pain and loneliness, and on the mystery of our life journeys and mortality, drawing from the life and work of Benita Raphan.

Miquel Martí Freixas