(GREAT BARRINGTON and PITTSFIELD, Mass.) – The award-winning documentary film Gregory Crewdson: Brief Encounters, which chronicles the longtime Berkshire-based art photographer’s creative process and evolution, following him as he drives around Berkshire side streets and avenues and creates film-like sets and scenarios in Lee and Pittsfield, will be screened on Saturday, February 9, 2013, at 4:30 p.m. at the Beacon Cinema in Pittsfield and on Sunday, February 10, 2013, at 11 a.m. at the Triplex Cinema in Great Barrington, in a special presentation by the Berkshire International Film Festival (BIFF)’s Reel Friends Film Society. There will be a Q&A with Gregory Crewdson immediately following the screening on Saturday at the Beacon. The film, directed by Ben Shapiro, was the closing night presentation at last year’s BIFF and screened to a sold-out and enthusiastic audience at the Mahaiwe.

Tickets are $5 and the screenings are open to the public.

To call Gregory Crewdson a photographer is a misnomer. Crewdson doesn’t “take” images; he creates them, through elaborate days and weeks of invention, design, and set-up. The epic production of these movie-like images is both intensely personal and highly public: they begin in Crewdson’s deepest desires and memories, but come to life on streets and soundstages in the hills and towns of Western Massachusetts.

In his decade-long project Beneath the Roses, he uses light, color and character to conjure arresting images, managing a crew of 60 amidst seemingly countless logistical and creative obstacles. Crewdson says of his work, “My pictures are about a search for a moment — a perfect moment. To me the most powerful moment in the whole process is when everything comes together and there is that perfect, beautiful, still moment. And for that instant, my life makes sense.”

An acclaimed photographer with the eye of a filmmaker, Crewdson has created some of the most gorgeously haunting pictures in the history of the medium. His meticulously composed, large-scale images are stunning narratives of small-town American life — moviescapes crystallized into a single frame. While the photographs are staged with crews that rival many feature film productions, Crewdson takes inspiration as much from his own dreams and fantasies as the worlds of Alfred Hitchcock, David Lynch, Edward Hopper and Diane Arbus. Crewdson’s imagery has also infiltrated the pop culture landscape — including his inimitable Six Feet Under ads and Yo La Tengo album art.

Shot over a decade with unprecedented access, Gregory Crewdson: Brief Encounters beautifully bares the artist’s process — and it’s as mesmerizing and riveting as the images themselves. Filmmaker Magazine called the film, “A refreshingly frank look at the artistic process, as comprehensive and lovingly realized as the work it pays tribute to.”

BIFF 2013 will take place May 30 – June 2, 2013.