BENITA | Festival opening session

Benita Raphan's family suggested Alan Berliner the possibility of finishing an unfinished short film by the deceased filmmaker, of whom he had been a mentor and friend. Faced with the impossibility of undertaking that project, he proposed creating a posthumous portrait of her instead. The filmmaker left behind a filmography of beautiful portraits of the poet Emily Dickinson, the mathematician John Nash, and the architect Buckminster Fuller, as well as an immense personal archive filled with outtakes, notes, drawings, photographs, home movies, and more than forty hard drives.

Berliner will talk to us about Benita, but through the filmmaker's own texts, sounds, and images — using them to explore how little we truly know about others. A great expert in constructing portraits, inquiries into family history, and intimate writings through a methodical and masterful reorganisation of the archive — Intimate Stranger (1991), Nobody's Business (1996), Wide Awake (2006), First Cousin Once Removed (2012)—, Berliner meditates, with more doubts than certainties, on personal stimuli and cinematic creation, on pain and solitude, on the mystery of our life journeys and mortality based on the life and work of Benita Raphan.

Miquel Martí Freixas