BENITA | Full Frame Documentary Festival | Thursday, April 16, 5 p.m. | The Carolina Theatre, Durham
The documentary BENITA, which screens this week at Durham’s Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, unfolds through fragments of journal entries, images, and half-finished ideas. Somewhere inside all of this is a life that feels both distant and uncomfortably close and familiar.
In BENITA, filmmaker Alan Berliner looks back on the life of his close friend, the experimental filmmaker Benita Raphan, who died by suicide during the isolating days of the COVID-19 pandemic. Raphan, who died at 58, was known for creating dreamlike short films about the minds of creative figures like the poet Emily Dickinson, the mathematician John Nash, and the futurist Buckminster Fuller.
Ahead of the documentary’s showing, I caught up with Berliner, who was in São Paulo, Brazil, ahead of his arrival in Durham and a trip to Spain after the festival. What follows is a conversation about solitude, obsession, artistic trust, and the strange intimacy of telling someone else’s story from the inside out. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
INDY: BENITA unfolds in a kind of quiet solitude. How did isolation, whether emotional, physical, or creative, shape the way you approached her story?
Alan Berliner: There are different kinds of isolation. Benita lived in a kind of solitude because she had to hide her struggles. Maybe it was her anxiety or her depression. But she felt that she had to hide it from the world for most of her life. Even as a child, her mother says, “Benita was a very complex little girl.” That’s not usually how a mother introduces her child.
She carried that. She had to hide her vulnerabilities or at least try to. And that kind of loneliness takes its toll.
Then there’s COVID. That changed everything. It magnified whatever was already there. For some people, that pressure created connection. But for Benita, it pushed her into a place she couldn’t navigate anymore. It took her into territory where she couldn’t solve the equation of her own life.
And out of that, she decided to make a film about mental health during COVID. It was a personal film, and that decision was huge. Her mother says it was like she was “coming out of the closet” about her mental health.
Do you think isolation was inherent to her work, or something that drove it?
Both. She made films about people who overcame obstacles like Emily Dickinson, John Nash, Helen Keller. I think she related to them. She got sustenance from their stories.
And after spending a year with her archive; with her journals, notebooks, photographs, [and] recordings, it was clear she was working through her struggles privately. Her art became the place where that could happen.
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You’re entering someone’s private inner world. Did you ever feel like you were crossing a boundary?
That’s a fair question. But Benita trusted me. I was one of the few people in the film world she was open with. When I went through her journals, my name came up a lot. She even calls me a “good angel” in the film.
Her family gave me permission to use everything. But more than that, I knew she believed in my work. If she had lived to make her own film about COVID and mental health, I would have been her creative advisor. I felt a responsibility to tell the truth of who she was. To make a real portrait. Because she had already made the most profound gesture an artist can make. She said, “If I can’t make my work, that’s like suffocation.” And then she took her life.
The film feels like a collage. It’s fragmented and nonlinear. How did you approach the gaps or the unknowns?
Benita made abstract biographies herself. She wasn’t interested in linear storytelling. So, I tried to stay inside her language.
The film is essentially a collage, almost a found-footage film, because nearly everything comes from her archive. And I didn’t think of it as filling gaps. I thought of it as collaborating with her. That was the central idea: I needed her help to tell her story.
So, I used her words and her handwriting, her grammar, even her misspellings. Sometimes she’s speaking to me, sometimes to the audience. Sometimes she redirects the narrative. It gives her agency. It allows her to exist in the film. At a certain point, when you’re doing this kind of work, the person’s spirit enters the process. You feel it. And it becomes collaborative in a very real way.
Did that change your relationship to her creatively or personally?
Of course. It made me reflect on my own life. I realized that what some people might call “obsession.” I spent a year going through 40 hard drives, reading every journal, looking at every image. That’s actually my strength. It’s my secret weapon.
Benita taught me that our struggles, our alienation, our quirks, the things we overcome, those are the things that make us who we are …. Art is a safe space for people who feel different. You can transform your struggles into something meaningful, even beautiful.”
alan berliner, filmmaker
Benita taught me that our struggles, our alienation, our quirks, the things we overcome, those are the things that make us who we are. And if you’re an artist, those things can become your material. Art is a safe space for people who feel different. You can transform your struggles into something meaningful, even beautiful.
There’s also a sense that she longed for community, even if she struggled with it. How do you see that tension?
She definitely felt isolated from the filmmaking world. She wasn’t part of that community. She didn’t go to festivals much. She wasn’t particularly social and might have been agoraphobic.
But that doesn’t mean she didn’t want connection. There’s a scene in the film where her best friend invites her for Thanksgiving, and instead of staying for dinner, she comes early, spends an hour, and leaves. That’s someone trying to connect, but on terms that feel safe.
The ending of the film at Riverside Park, at the bench that was dedicated to her, is quietly devastating. How did you arrive at that final moment?
I knew the film had to return to a physical place and something grounding. Benita was cremated, so the bench in Riverside Park became her memorial.
I shot people walking their dogs there. And there’s this moment where two women walk through the frame with a pack of dogs. It was something Benita would have loved. Something that could have been her life and that became a kind of metaphor. And then I added one word to the bench: “friend.” Her family had listed many things: filmmaker, daughter, sister. But not that. And I knew she wanted more friends in her life.
INDY: What do you want audiences to carry with them after watching Benita?
I hope they see themselves in her. Not literally but in the sense that there’s a little part of everyone somewhere in her story. That recognition can be subtle. It might be about struggle, or loneliness, or creativity. It might just be about what it means to be human.
And maybe, especially for people dealing with mental health issues, it changes how they see their own experience. Maybe it helps them. Maybe it gives them a different way to think about coping.
I also feel like, in a way, I’m finishing the film Benita wanted to make. She wanted to explore how COVID affected people with mental health struggles. And I hope this film carries some of that intention forward.
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