LORBER FILMS ANNOUNCES THE DVD RELEASE OF THE ALAN BERLINER COLLECTION: A 5-DISC SET OF FILMS BY ALAN BERLINER
New York, NY – June 13, 2011 – Lorber Films is proud to announce the DVD release of The Alan Berliner Collection, a 5-disc set of critically-acclaimed, award-winning films from Alan Berliner.
The set, which includes The Family Album (1986), Intimate Stranger (1991), Nobody’s Business (1996), The Sweetest Sound (2001), and Wide Awake (2006), comes to DVD in a 5-disc collection with bonus features including short films, interviews with Alan Berliner, and special DVD-ROM features. The set is priced at $99.95. It is available for prebook on May 31, 2011, with a street date of June 28, 2011.
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. 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.”
“For the past 25 years, my work has traveled through the murky landscapes of human connectedness known as ‘the family.’ Messy. Complicated. Frighteningly familiar. Even embarrassing. I am endlessly fascinated by what it means to be related to others – culturally, psychologically, and genetically (past, present and future) – and have chosen to approach the family from the most personal perspective possible, treating my own family as a kind of living laboratory. At the same time, I want all of my films to transcend their detail and specificity by poetically illuminating the universal, the enduring – hopefully even the mythic qualities that bind us together as human beings.
All of my films are rooted in my unwavering search for new (and uniquely) cinematic forms of storytelling. As such, they defy easy description. Experimental. Documentary. Biographical. Autobiographical. Essay. Personal. And all of their myriad combinations. I am comfortable at this crossroads of cinematic genre, language and vocabulary – a place where there are no rules, only endless possibilities. I am committed to making films in which the way I tell a story becomes as compelling as the story itself.”
-Alan Berliner
THE ALAN BERLINER COLLECTION (5-DVD SET)
THE FAMILY ALBUM (1986)
“…a great humanistic statement made out of found sources.” – Roger Ebert
Official Selection – Sundance Film Festival
Winner – Golden Gate Award, San Francisco International Film Festival
Official Selection – Cinema Du Reel Film Festival
The Family Album is a one-hour experimental documentary collage film utilizing a vast collection of rare, anonymous 16mm home movies from the 1920s through the 1950s. These home movies are authentic documents of American folk history and culture, taken from the personal vantage point of the amateur photographic eye. The film’s soundtrack is derived from an eclectic variety of family audio recordings and oral history interviews. Structured from birth to death, the film weaves these sounds and images into the form of a composite lifetime, passing through the celebrations and struggles from childhood to adulthood, from innocence to experience. It is a universal yet intimate portrait of the American family, not scripted, not rehearsed, not immune to the conflicts and contradictions underlying family life and its rituals.
BONUS FEATURES:
POV Interview with Alan Berliner
City Edition – A Short Film by Alan Berliner
The Art of Process – a DVD-ROM Catalogue
French, Spanish and English Subtitles
US / 1986 / 60 min. / 4:3 (Full Frame) / Not Rated / in English
INTIMATE STRANGER (1991)
“Compellingly eccentric…powerful, bittersweet…a rich, tumultuous portrait of family life…” – The New York Times
Emmy Award Nominee – 1993
World Premiere – New York Film Festival
Winner – Distinguished Achievement Award, International Documentary Association
Official Selection – Sundance Film Festival
The elusive subject of this groundbreaking family portrait is Joseph Cassuto, filmmaker Alan Berliner’s maternal grandfather – a Palestinian Jew who lived in Egypt and was a cotton buyer for the Japanese prior to World War II. With Hitler’s armies just miles away from Alexandria, Cassuto’s family is split in half. They reunite in New York after the war but Cassuto decides to move to Japan, virtually abandoning his wife and children in the U.S. while he pursues his business interests and a life-long love affair with Japanese culture.
Seventeen years after his death, Berliner has constructed a poetic and emotional jigsaw puzzle out of the voluminous memorabilia of his grandfather’s life story. What emerges is a curious legacy – admiration and love from Cassuto’s Japanese business associates; resentment from his family. Depending on who you ask, Cassuto was either a romantic adventurer or a shirker of family responsibility; a man at the center of historic events or a nobody. Family members try to make sense of it all in this witty, candid and cinematically inventive documentary biography.
BONUS FEATURES:
POV Interview with Alan Berliner
Myth in the Electric Age – a short film by Alan Berliner
The Art of Process – a DVD-ROM catalogue
French, Spanish & English subtitles
1991 / US / 60 min. / 4:3 (full frame) / Not Rated / in English
NOBODY’S BUSINESS (1996)
“Alan Berliner illustrates the power of fine art to transform life.” – The New York Times
“Brilliantly funny and piercingly real.” – USA Today
Emmy Award Winner – 1998
Winner – Caligari Film Prize, Berlin International Film Festival
World Premiere – New York Film Festival
Winner – Innovation in Documentary Festival Dei Popoli
Alan Berliner takes on his reclusive father as the reluctant subject of this poignant and graceful study of family history and memory. What emerges is a dramatically engaging biography that finds both humor and pathos in the swirl of conflicts and affections that bind father and son. Ultimately this complex portrait is a meeting of the minds – where the past meets the present, where generations collide, and where the boundaries of family life are pushed, pulled, stretched, torn and surprisingly at times, also healed.
Berliner achieves a rare feat of inter-generational sleuthing as he weaves together emotionally rich interviews with family members, an extraordinary array of archival material and home movies, and compelling original footage into a uniquely cinematic collage. This inventive and touching essay has become a classic film about the nature of family relationships.
BONUS FEATURES:
POV Interview with Alan Berliner
Everywhere at Once – a short film by Alan Berliner
The Art of Process – a DVD-ROM catalogue
French, Spanish & English subtitles
US / 1996 / 58 min. / 4:3 (full frame) / Not Rated / in English
THE SWEETEST SOUND (2001)
“Charming and brilliant…funny and wise and provocative.” – Austin Chronicle
Official Selection – SXSW Film Festival
World Premiere – Berlin International Film Festival
Official Selection – Festival Dei Popoli
Alan Berliner is a lawyer in Columbus. Alan Berliner is a social worker in Seattle. Alan Berliner is a celebrity photographer in Los Angeles. Tired of being mistaken for these people and anyone else who might share his name, Alan Berliner, the filmmaker from New York – not to be confused with Belgian filmmaker Alain Berliner – decides to rid himself of the dreaded Same Name Syndrome. His solution: invite all the Alan Berliners in the world over to his house for dinner.
With the intimacy and humor of a personal essay, Berliner dives headfirst inside the American name pool in search of the treasures and dangers hidden inside his own name. In the end, Berliner leaves us with a greater sense of the power and magic embedded in a name, and how all of our identities are inescapably shaped by what we call ourselves. A film guaranteed to make you think twice about the who, the why and the where contained in every name, The Sweetest Sound has Berliner’s inimitable filmmaking signature written all over it.
BONUS FEATURES:
POV Interview with Alan Berliner
Natural History – a short film by Alan Berliner
The Art of Process – a DVD-ROM catalogue
French, Spanish & English subtitles
US / 2001 / 60 min. / 4:3 (full frame) / Not Rated / in English
WIDE AWAKE (2006)
“Another glamorously eccentric achievement by filmmaker Alan Berliner.” – LA Weekly
“Imaginatively crafted and brilliantly edited.” – Hollywood Reporter
Official Selection – Hotdocs Film Festivals
World Premiere – Sundance Film Festival
Official Selection – Berlin Film Festival
A film that balances the precision of a Swiss watch with the messiness of a restless mind, Wide Awake is Alan Berliner’s uniquely personal tour through this life-long obsession with insomnia. Berliner uses both metaphor and candid first-person observations to illuminate how an obsessive mind that won’t shut down at night leaves him feeling “jet lagged in his own time zone.”
By focusing on the effects of insomnia on Berliner’s creative process, Wide Awake also becomes a film about the art of filmmaking. We see footage documenting the process of the film being made, a raucously caffeinated tour of his studio, and revelations about Berliner’s secret life as a night owl. With the birth of his son Eli, Berliner becomes torn between his love of the night and the emotional pulls of love and responsibility that he feels for his family.
A sophisticated blend of the hilarious and deeply personal, Wide Awake is a cinematically innovative film that pushes at the borders of documentary storytelling; a heartfelt portrait of the artist as insomniac.
BONUS FEATURES:
KQED TV Interview with Alan Berliner
Alan Berliner on Wide Awake
The Art of Process – a DVD-ROM catalogue
Sleep Q&A – A DVD-ROM Extra
Chasing Time – a DVD-ROM Story
French, Spanish & English subtitles
US / 2006 / 79 min. / 4:3 (full frame) / Not Rated / in English
THE ALAN BERLINER COLLECTION
Director: Alan Berliner
Genre: Documentary
SRP: $99.95
Prebook Date: May 31, 2011
Street Date: June 28, 2011
US / 1986 – 2006 / 240 min. / 4:3 (full frame / Color and B&W / Not Rated / in English
About Kino Lorber
Kino Lorber is the newly formed company that combines the resources, staffs and libraries of Lorber Films, Alive Mind and Kino International, bringing together industry pioneers Richard Lorber and Donald Krim to create a new leader in independent film distribution.