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14 November 2025

“Her Archive Was Kind of a Trail… A Filmmaker’s Trail”: Alan Berliner on his DOC NYC-debuting BENITA

Written by Paul Moon

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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 […]

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Paul Moon

H. Paul Moon is a filmmaker based in New York City and Washington, D.C. whose works concentrate on the performing arts. Major films include “Sitka: A Piano Documentary” about the craftsmanship of Steinway pianos, “Quartet for the End of Time” about Olivier Messiaen’s transcendent WWII composition, and an acclaimed feature film about the life and music of American composer Samuel Barber that premiered on PBS. Moon has created music videos for numerous composers including Moondog, Susan Botti and Angélica Negrón, and three opera films set in a community garden. His film “The Passion of Scrooge” was awarded “Critic's Choice” by Opera News as a “thoroughly enjoyable film version, insightfully conceived and directed” with “first-rate and remarkably illustrative storytelling.” Further highlights include works featured in exhibitions at the Nevada Museum of Art and the City Museum of New York, PBS television broadcasts, and best of show awards in over a dozen international film festivals.