HAMPTONS DOC FEST HONORS ALAN BERLINER
WITH THE 2025 PENNEBAKER CAREER ACHIEVEMENT AWARD
The master of personal documentary filmmaking
GALA EVENING ALAN BERLINER
SATURDAY, DEC 6
BAY STREET THEATER
6:30PM Cocktail Reception
8:00PM Pennebaker Award and Interview with Alan Berliner
Followed by screening of BENITA
Alan Berliner's uncanny ability to combine experimental cinema, artistic purpose, and popular appeal in compelling film essays has made him one of America's most acclaimed independent filmmakers. He is a recipient of Guggenheim, Rockefeller, and Jerome Foundation Fellowships, has won three Emmy Awards, and received seven Emmy nominations.
Berliner’s films are always personal. He uses his life as a laboratory to encourage viewers to think about their own lives. Berliner sees his body of work as a lifelong project, exploring memory, identity, family, relationships and love. In an interview in 2001 he said, “My films appear to be about me, but they really are not, they are about you, the viewer.”
Berliner first achieved recognition with a group of innovative films made between 1975 and 1985, but it was his first hour-long experimental documentary, The Family Album that created a true buzz. In the film Berliner used a vast collection of anonymous 16mm home movies from more than 75 different families to create a universal portrait of the American family. Roger Ebert called it “the most intriguing film” of the 1987 Edinburgh International Film Festival. Next up was Intimate Stranger (1991) which explored family through the extraordinary life story of Berliner’s maternal grandfather, a Jewish man raised in Egypt, with a passion for Japan. The Washington Post wrote it was “so wholly original in both style and substance as to seem completely without precedent…a spectacular high wire feat by a master.” This was followed by Nobody’s Business which turned the camera on Berliner’s reclusive and reluctant father. Writing in Film Comment, critic Phillip Lopate said: “I know of no one working in personal films today who can do so well what Alan Berliner does: bring dramatically alive the intense agony and ambivalence and love within families.”
His feature-length films, which also include Letter to the Editor (2019), First Cousin Once Removed (2013), Wide Awake (2006) and The Sweetest Sound (2001) have been shown all over the world, and received awards and prizes at many major international film festivals. The New York Times has described Berliner's work as "powerful, compelling and bittersweet...full of juicy conflict and contradiction, innovative in their cinematic technique, unpredictable in their structures...Alan Berliner illustrates the power of fine art to transform life."
Over the years, Berliner’s films have become part of the core curriculum for documentary filmmaking and film history classes at universities internationally and are in the collections of many film societies, festivals, libraries, colleges, and museums. All of his films are in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art.
In an interview with journalist Anne S. Lewis about his work and process, Berliner said, “If I had to choose some descriptive words, I’d say that all of my films and installations are highly edited constructions, trying to re-imagine and re-frame our relationships to things we often take for granted…Lots to think about, fun to interact with, playful but controlled – and/but also unpredictable, inspired, and each authentic in its very own way. And last but not least, labors of love, each and every one of them. Simple as that.”
BENITA, screening at this year’s Hamptons Doc Fest, is his most recent film.
