Twenty years ago producer/ director Ira Wohl won the collective nod of every festival jury, including the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, that screened Best Boy, a doc about his mentally retarded cousin. Last week he finished the sequel, Best Man: `Best Boy’ and All of Us Twenty Years Later.

‘I left the film business, which is why I’m now able to do another film,’ explains Wohl, on the topic of the gap between productions. After Best Boy, Wohl wrote, produced and directed for tv, but in 1990 became frustrated with the industry – ‘I had trouble doing what I wanted to do’ – so went back to school and became a psychotherapist, perhaps cathartically, specializing in issues dealing with the entertainment industry.

Produced by Wohl’s l.a.-based Only Child Motion Pictures, Best Man started to shoot six weeks after the idea, greenlit via prebuys from hbo (‘They’re great, they say yes and then just let you do it’), the ubiquitous Channel 4 in the u.k. and France’s equally indispensable La Sept/arte.

The first doc was shot over four years, and chronicled how Wohl’s 50-year-old cousin Philly became independent, culminating in his moving into a group home. Now 70, Philly becomes bar mitzvahed and his old family and new family come together for the event.

It is set for spring ’98 broadcast, and Wohl is looking for a distrib with an eye to theatrical release in the interim.

Wohl describes it as ‘a film about the value of family.’ It’s shot by dop Tom McDonough and the same crew who came together 20 years ago. Wohl says the film is not only about what happened to its star, but ‘about all of us involved with him.’

Wohl has two new docs in the works: Keeping The Faith is about the last Orthodox Jewish community in Mississippi; the other is about heroin.

Best Man screens today at 4:15 p.m. at the Cumberland.