Intimate Stranger Film

An unusually resonant portrait of Joseph Cassuto, Alan Berliner's maternal grandfather, a Palestinian Jew who was a cotton buyer for the Japanese in Egypt prior to World War II. Berliner presents Cassuto with a paradoxical legacy -- admiration and love from his Japanese business associates; resentment from his family. Depending on who you ask, Cassuto was either a man at the center of historic events or a nobody who craved attention. 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.

Alan Berliner

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’ 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.”

In 2024, Berliner received a Visionary Tribute Lifetime Achievement Award from DOC NYC, the largest and most important documentary film festival in the United States. In 2025, Berliner received the Pennebaker Career Achievement Award at the Hampton Doc Fest Film Festival. His experimental documentary films, BENITA (2025), Letter to the Editor (2019), First Cousin Once Removed (2013), Wide Awake (2006), The Sweetest Sound (2001), Nobody’s Business (1996), Intimate Stranger (1991), and The Family Album (1986), have been broadcast all over the world, and received awards, prizes, and retrospectives at many major international film festivals.

The San Francisco International Film Festival called Berliner, “America’s foremost cinematic essayist.” The Florida Film Festival called him “the modern master of personal documentary filmmaking.” Over the years, Berliner’s films have become part of the core curriculum for documentary filmmaking and film history classes at universities worldwide and are in the permanent collections of many film societies, festivals, libraries, colleges and museums. All of his films are in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art.