A Filmmaker Whose Camera Gets No Shut-Eye

"As I give it," Alan declares. "I get it."

"Wide Awake" is -- for Berliner -- simply the latest in a career of films that have mined personal significance from a vast library of old-time film footage he owns, from personal home movies and interviews with his family, including his sister Lynn, his mother, Regina, and late father, Oscar.

"The Family Album," a 1986 film, was a composite portrait of the American family, culled from anonymous home movies from the 1920s through the 1950s. "Intimate Stranger," in 1991, probed his maternal grandfather's eccentric life as a cotton merchant 11 months of the year in Japan, away from his family. The 1996 "Nobody's Business" amounted to an Oedipal tussle, as Berliner attempted to interest Oscar in their family history. ("What do I care?" says his blase dad.) And for 2001's "The Sweetest Sound," he looked for everybody in the world named Alan Berliner and invited them to dinner.

And finally, we have Berliner's mother on -- you know.

When her son started making films in the 1980s, Regina recalls, "he'd stick me on the couch with a microphone and I would talk to him, never realizing that, one day, it would be up on the screen. Now I know better."

She'd rather not, for instance, have revealed she married Oscar just to get out of her controlling father's household -- a disclosure revealed in "Intimate Stranger." And she regrets talking about her loveless marriage and divorce in "Nobody's Business." But she acknowledges, "That's what makes him a good filmmaker." And she's also happy that, long after she has passed on, audiences "will see that I was an independent woman for many years, and I worked with Alan and tried to help him as much as possible with his career -- even though he delved into my guts all these years."

Wide Awake, with special guest Alan Berliner, will be shown at 9:45 p.m. Saturday at the D.C. Jewish Community Center, 1529 16th St. NW. It will also be screened at 4:15 p.m. tomorrow at the Avalon. Call 202-777-3248 or visit http://www.wjff.org.