From Tragedy to Art – Alan Berliner’s ‘Benita’ Debuts at DOC NYC

Benita is an intimate portrait of New York filmmaker Benita Raphan, who died by suicide during the height of the Covid pandemic.

Directed by Alan Berliner, the film will World Premiere in the Special Presentation program at DOC NYC.

Benita may not have left behind a suicide note, but Berliner 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.

Having been the creative advisor on several of Benita’s films, Benita thought of Berliner as a mentor. “In the aftermath of her death, I was haunted by the realization that while I may have known the celebrations and struggles of Benita’s film career, I had no idea what was really going on behind the scenes. In retrospect, I now see that everything we worked on contained hints of Benita’s emotional turmoil and the depth of her pain,” said Berliner.

“Benita’s family asked if I’d be willing to finish the film Benita had been working on when she died. I told them that even though I’d worked with her for years, I could never duplicate the mystery and beauty that Benita always brought to her work,” said Berliner. Instead Berliner set out to create a unique portrait of Benita that became an experiment in collaboration between filmmaker and subject.

“As much as I was making a film about Benita, I was also making a film with her. My aim was to give Benita a unique presence (a voice) inside the film, allowing her personality, her character, and her spirit to shine through, even amidst the darkness of her struggles.”

Berliner told the New York Times, “Her films were not so much about their subject as they were about the issues they evoked. They’re filled with hints of things, synaptic touches that trigger thoughts. Sometimes I thought of her as a scientist in an artist’s body. She was always interested in the mystery of things.”

Raphan once said, “I am interested in revisiting a life or a career from the very start, from the beginning; the basic concept as initial thought, as an impulse, as an ineffable compulsion, an intuition; to reframe and reinvent an action as simple as one pair of hands touching pencil to paper.”