A cinematic landmark over 50 years in the making, feast your eyes on William Greaves’ posthumous release Once Upon a Time in Harlem. The film’s U.S. distributor Neon debuted the teaser trailer for the documentary today ahead of its October theatrical run.
Once Upon a Time in Harlem invites audiences to join a who’s who of the Black intelligentsia as they convene at Duke Ellington’s New York apartment one wild night in 1972. With Greaves filming alongside his son, David, who completed the movie following his father’s passing, the documentary features luminaries from the Harlem Renaissance as they reflect upon a cultural movement coming into being. It’s a truly unique time capsule as these voices who shaped history now become history in a work edited together 50 years after the shoot. At once fusing past and present, the film masterfully captures the significance of cultural memory and what it means to reflect, interpret, and preserve artistic expression through a distinct collective voice. The film is produced by Liani Greaves and Anne de Mare.
“This tug of war between past and present glories and struggles, both celebration and commemoration, makes this film as vital as any in Greaves’ canon,” Jason Gorber wrote in his review for POV from Sundance. “The use of split screens and overlapping dialogue feels completely coherent in 2026, whereas back in the early 1970s, it may well have been as astonishingly experimental and challenging as the wild formalism that Symbiopsychotaxiplasm exemplified. Yet this very sense of the contemporary gives these stories such power generations on, providing a pure form of historical record wrapped in an artistically sophisticated work of non-fiction.”
Once Upon a Time in Harlem begins its theatrical release in October.
Read more about the film in our current issue featuring an interview with David and Liani Greaves.
