In 1969, the pioneering documentarian William Greaves wrote of his fury over the racially degrading stereotypes that white film producers threw up on American screens. \u201cIt became clear to me that unless we black people began to produce information for screen and television there would always be a distortion of the \u2018black image,\u2019\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Three years later, Greaves began work on what he considered the most important footage he ever shot: a feature documentary gathering surviving figures of the Harlem Renaissance<\/a> to reflect on the movement they had built half a century earlier.<\/p>\n Now, more than 50 years after cameras rolled, Once Upon a Time in Harlem<\/a> is finally receiving its international premiere in Cannes\u2019 Directors\u2019 Fortnight \u2013 completed not by William Greaves, who died in 2014, but by his son David and granddaughter Liani.<\/p>\n The documentary centres on a cocktail party Greaves hosted at Duke Ellington<\/a>\u2019s townhouse in Harlem in August 1972 \u2013 an attempt to capture the voices of artists, writers, musicians and organisers whose work had transformed Black American culture in the 1920s, but whose stories were already at risk of being sidelined.<\/p>\n Greaves invited every surviving participant he could locate. Many had not seen one another for decades. They included the painter Aaron Douglas; the queer artist and writer Richard Bruce Nugent; the poet Arna Bontemps; the musicians Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle; the photographer James Van Der Zee; and Ida Mae Cullen, the widow of Countee Cullen.<\/p>\n For four hours, Greaves filmed them as they laughed, reminisced and debated. The resulting film follows the rhythm of the party itself: tentative greetings and warm memories gradually giving way to animated debates over politics, language and legacy.<\/p>\n David Greaves, who was there in 1972 aged 22, worked on the shoot as a cameraman under his father. \u201cI was aware of the people involved and how important they were,\u201d he told the Guardian. \u201cMy father thought they were extraordinary, and there we were to capture them.\u201d<\/p>\n Duke Ellington himself was unwell and did not attend, but his sister Ruth was present. \u201cThere were four cameras, two crews circulating through the apartment catching conversations, these little moments between them,\u201d David said. \u201cMostly my father just let them freestyle, it was very fluid.\u201d<\/p>\n Among the film\u2019s strengths is precisely that looseness. At one point, guests debate whether the term \u201cNegro\u201d should be discarded in favour of \u201cAfro-American\u201d. Elsewhere, they discuss Marcus Garvey and Langston Hughes and the global reverberations of anti-colonial struggle. Aaron Douglas reflects on jazz, telling the room: \u201cIt would be considered a revolution in relation to other music. It was not a revolution to us.\u201d<\/p>\n For David Greaves, those conversations feel strikingly current. \u201cWhen they talk about whether to call themselves Black or Negro, that\u2019s a discussion still happening now \u2013 you\u2019ve got Black, African American, people of colour. And then there is still this question of what the diaspora should do in relation to Africa.\u201d<\/p>\n He points to footage in the film of Haile Selassie\u2019s 1936 appeal to the League of Nations after Italy\u2019s invasion of Ethiopia. While editing it, he thought of Volodymyr Zelenskyy seeking international support<\/a> after Russia\u2019s invasion of Ukraine. \u201cSelassie didn\u2019t get help, but Zelenskyy was able to. And now they\u2019re at a point where they\u2019re building their own munitions, they\u2019re fighting off the Russians with one hand and helping the Gulf states with the other.\u201d<\/p>\n The film also reminds viewers how recent America\u2019s racial violence remains. David points to footage accompanying the anti-lynching poem The Lynching, ending on a young white girl watching with what he calls \u201cfiendish glee\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cShe would have been about the same age as my father, which means her child would be my age, her grandchild my daughter\u2019s age,\u201d he said. \u201cAll three of us vote. The US is not that far away from that time, just three generations. That is kind of bracing.\u201d<\/p>\n