First Cousin Once Removed Film

First Cousin Once Removed, Alan Berliner’s deeply personal portrait of Edwin Honig, his “good friend, cousin and mentor,” is a first-hand look at Honig’s journey through the ravages of memory loss and Alzheimer’s disease. For most of his adult life Honig was a distinguished poet, translator, critic, and professor. The film is an unflinching essay on the fragility of being human and a stark reminder of the profound role that memory plays in all of our lives.

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.