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Awards and Honors

On November 25th, 2012 FIRST COUSIN ONCE REMOVED received the Grand Prize for Best Documentary Feature at IDFA, the International Documentary Film Festival in Amsterdam, Holland.


Grand Prize for Best Documentary Feature IDFA (2012)
Gotham Award Nomination for Best Documentary Feature (2013)
Cinema Eye Honors Nomination for Outstanding Achievement in Directing (2014)
Cinema Eye Honors Nomination for Outstanding Achievement in Editing (2014)
Short-Listed for Documentary Oscar Nomination (2014)

IDFA Grand Prize (2012)

"Alan Berliner employs intelligence, inventiveness and a poetic sensibility to create a film that uses the onset on Alzheimer's to make a beautiful, moving, and artistic statement about the intersection of personal history and memory."

Jury Statement

"Once in a blue moon a festival competition film comes along that’s a masterpiece, so flawless it’s inconceivable that it won’t take top prize. This year at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam, that film was Alan Berliner’s First Cousin Once Removed(which I actually saw before this year’s 25th edition began), and it did indeed nabb the VPRO IDFA Award for Best Feature-Length Documentary, along with a nice sum of 12,500 euros. Fittingly, my reaction towards Berliner’s breathtaking portrait of his mentor and relative, the acclaimed poet and translator Edwin Honig, as he succumbs to Alzheimer’s disease, mirrors my take on IDFA itself. This crème de la crème fest, that in the past quarter century has grown to become the biggest doc event in the world, is simply in a league of its own."

Lauren Wissot, Filmmaker Magazine, November 30, 2012