Date: Tuesday, April 29, 2025
Time: 7:00pm ET
Venue: IFC Center, 323 Sixth Ave, NYC
TRT: 120 minutes
Director: Alan Berliner
Emmy Award-winning filmmaker Alan Berliner received a Lifetime Achievement Award at DOC NYC’s 2024 Visionaries Tribute, where he was described as “a virtuoso of essayistic documentary”. To continue the celebration of Berliner’s work, DOC NYC is proud to present new digital prints of two of his early career successes in a unique double-bill (each film is 60 minutes long; total screening is 2 hours).
In Intimate Stranger (1991), Berliner constructs a poetic and emotional jigsaw puzzle out of the mysteries of his maternal grandfather’s unconventional life. A Palestinian Jew who was a cotton buyer for the Japanese in Egypt, Joseph Cassuto’s family was split in two by prior to World War II. Yet after reuniting in New York City after the war, as Cassuto’s restlessness drives him to spend most of his time in Japan, far away from his wife and children. Intimate Stranger “walks the fine line between sorting the dirty family laundry and polishing the precious family jewel” (Berliner).
In his Emmy-winning Nobody’s Business (1996), Berliner takes on his reclusive father as the reluctant subject of a poignant and graceful study of family history and memory, creating something of a companion piece to Intimate Stranger. Berliner achieves a rare feat of inter-generational sleuthing as he weaves a complex tapestry of conversations, archival footage and live action.
The double-bill screening will be followed by an on-stage conversation with filmmaker Alan Berliner.
See more and save! Get a DOC NYC Selects Spring 2025 Season Pass, good for all four screenings April 22 through May 13, 2025 ($35 for IFC Center members, $55 for general admission).