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  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. His award-winning documentary films, Nobody's Business, Intimate Stranger, and The Family Album (all featured on POV) have been broadcast all over the world and have been honored at top international film festivals. He has won three Emmy Awards, and has had retrospectives of his films staged at both the Museum of Modern Art and the International Center of Photography in New York. A native New Yorker, Berliner is currently a faculty member at the New School for Social Research, where he teaches a course entitled “Experiments in Time, Light and Motion.” Berliner received a Distinguished Achievement Award from the International Documentary Association in 1993, and was a recipient of the Storyteller Award from the 2001 Taos Talking Picture Film Festival this past April. In addition to his work in film, Berliner has also produced a large body of audio/video installation work. He will be an artist in residence at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis later this year, and has been commissioned to create a large-scale interactive sculpture titled “Gathering Stones” for Holocaust Museum Houston which will open in March 2002.
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You've probably never heard of Joseph Cassuto, but by the end of this film you may think that he was the most elusive, fascinating and baffling man to have ever lived. Cassuto is filmmaker Alan Berliner's maternal grandfather, a Palestinian Jew who was a cotton buyer for the Japanese in Egypt 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 is restless there. He moves to Japan to spend eleven months of the year, virtually abandoning his wife and children in the United States while he pursues his business interests and a lifelong love affair with Japanese culture. Seventeen years after his death, his grandson 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.
Intimate Stranger," says Berliner, "walks the fine line between sorting the dirty family laundry and polishing the precious family jewel." Family members try to make sense of it all in this witty, candid and cinematically inventive documentary biography. (1 hour)
"Funny, probing and so wholly original in both style and
substance as to seem completely without precedent...
brilliant, one-of-a-kind film...the remarkable life of a
seemingly average man presents a figure as complicated and
enthralling as any fictional character in recent memory...
intoxicating montage...expertly pieced together...
a spectacular high-wire feat by a fledgling master."
— THE WASHINGTON POST
"Compellingly eccentric...powerful, bittersweet...
a rich, tumultuous portrait of family life..."
— THE NEW YORK TIMES
"A stunningly imaginative hand-made one-man film,
Intimate Stranger combines biography,
personal inquiry, a search for roots, 20th century
history, family portraiture and cultural anthropology
in a work of unusual resonance."
— VARIETY
"Including the conflicting assessments of devotion
and enmity of the central character transforms
Intimate Stranger into a poignant depiction
of universal family dynamics...."
— THE SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE
"A terrific exercise in family exorcism.
Filmmaker Alan Berliner has createdan affectionate, witty
and ineffably moving portrait...heartbreakingly universal."
— THE ATLANTA CONSTITUTION
"Intimate Stranger is documentary
storytelling of a very high order."
— SUNDANCE FILM FESTIVAL
"...one of the most remarkable nonfiction films around."
USA FILM FESTIVAL
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