‘Once Upon a Time in Harlem’ Review: William Greaves’ Footage of Harlem Renaissance Luminaries Is a Vital Historical Artifact

In 1972, legendary documentarian and “Symbiopsychotaxiplasm” director William Greaves arranged a cocktail party at the home of Duke Ellington. Its stated purpose was to assemble as many of the surviving luminaries from the Harlem Renaissance, the fruitful intellectual and artistic period that emerged from Harlem in the 1920s and ’30s, in one room to document their conversations. Many of the attendees, which included artists and thinkers Richard Bruce Nugent, Arna Bontemps, Eubie Blake, Leigh Whipper, and Aaron Douglas, had not seen each other for 50 years. As long as that sounds, it took even longer for the film to premiere.

Fifty-four years after the party and 12 years after Greaves’ death, the film he shot that night has finally bowed at Sundance. “Once Upon a Time in Harlem,” co-directed by William and his son David Greaves (who worked as a cameraman at the party and assembled the footage), is a portrait of old friends and acquaintances reconnecting. The majority of the film is simply conversations from the party, allowing these intellectual giants to be seen as people as they reminisce about their place in history and try to predict an uncertain future.

The fact that this footage exists is nothing short of a miracle. Watching all of these intellectuals reconnect, spar about their legacies, and continue to debate the very ideas that brought them together in the first place is a treat for scholars and history buffs. “Once Upon a Time in Harlem” instantly becomes mandatory viewing for anyone writing a book or dissertation on any of these figures, or even just trying to expand their knowledge of a crucial period of American history.

The best choice that either Greaves makes is simply letting the conversations play out with minimal edits. Rather than just showing these thinkers reciting their greatest hits, the longform discussions showcase all of the contradictions (and occasional rifts) between members of the same movement. It deprives viewers of the chance to oversimplify the Harlem Renaissance as a monolithic group of people who all believed the same thing. The inevitable nuance that arises from letting people express their actual thoughts for long enough is likely to be the film’s greatest legacy.

After watching “Once Upon a Time in Harlem,” it becomes a lot harder to hold onto any specific conclusions about the Harlem Renaissance that you picked up from a high school textbook. The film makes it clear how passionate some of these people were about radical economic policies, not just jazz and poetry and civil rights like some would have you believe. More than that, it makes it clear that the Renaissance was less of an organized movement than a group of brilliant thinkers whose proximity to each other at a specific time in their lives made them all sharper. Disagreement and contradiction are a necessary component of that dynamism, because these are all distinct individuals — something that “Once Upon a Time in Harlem” lays out clearly.

The nuance and specificity that makes the film so interesting is also why it requires a decent knowledge base to appreciate — this is about as far from an introduction to the Harlem Renaissance as you’ll find. It’s fair to question whether anything could have been added to the footage to make it slightly more accessible to a larger audience, especially given how much societal value there would be to having more people see the footage, but the film commits to its vision wholeheartedly enough that we can safely say it’s presented the way Greaves wanted. There’s value in that, too.

Press materials for the film say that Greaves considered the cocktail party the most important event that he ever documented, a claim that’s hard to verify but seems extremely plausible. His legacy as a filmmaker was firmly cemented before this posthumous footage came out, but “Once Upon a Time in Harlem” should be remembered as a coda to an incredible career.

Grade: B+

“Once Upon a Time in Harlem” premiered at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.

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