Benita Raphan
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“Her Archive Was Kind of a Trail… A Filmmaker’s Trail”: Alan Berliner on his DOC NYC-debuting BENITA
Recipient of DOC NYC 2024’s Lifetime Achievement Award (as well as the 2025 Pennebaker Career Achievement Award at the upcoming Hamptons Doc Fest), the “virtuoso of essayistic documentary” Alan Berliner (Letter to the Editor, First Cousin Once Removed) returns to this year’s fest with BENITA, an unconventional portrait of an even more unconventional artist. Benita Raphan was a NYC filmmaker (and a MacDowell fellow in 2004 and a Guggenheim fellow in 2019) best known for her own short portraits of eccentric artists, from John Nash, to Buckminster Fuller, to Emily Dickinson. After graduating from the School of Visual Arts, Raphan […]
by Lauren Wissot on Nov 14, 2025 -
An Interesting Question
When Penelope Green, an obituary writer for The New York Times, called to speak with me about Benita Raphan in April 2021, I was still in a place between sadness and disbelief. Benita, who was one of Filmmaker’s “25 New Faces of Indie Film” in 1998, had made more than a dozen films across her career (and was in the process of creating a new one), when she died by suicide three months earlier on January 10, 2021. Benita’s decades-long struggle with depression and anxiety, magnified by the isolation and solitude of the COVID-19 pandemic—combined with the loss of her […]
by Alan Berliner on Oct 11, 2022
