By Jason Osiason
Once Upon a Time in Harlem is a deeply engrossing documentary that basically locks some of an era’s smartest, most creative and yes crankiest voices in a room and just lets them go at each other. High IQ bickering, arguing, correcting one another, patronizing each other, fighting over memories and interpretations of history. And somehow it’s all completely fascinating and madly entertaining to watch. The movie understands that these people are not polished talking heads. They are complicated, opinionated figures carrying entire cultural legacies on their backs and they treat those legacies with the kind of passion that spills into every conversation.
In August of 1972 William Greaves threw a cocktail party at Duke Ellington’s townhouse in Harlem and invited everyone from the Harlem Renaissance who was still alive and could make it. Aaron Douglas, Romare Bearden, Arna Bontemps, Eubie Blake, James Van Der Zee, Richard Bruce Nugent. He put four cameras in the room, one of them run by his son David, and shot the whole afternoon on 16mm. Then the footage sat there for over fifty years. Greaves died in 2014 and David finally finished it, cutting a four hour party down to 100 minutes. The movie is basically that party.
What makes the film special is how alive those memories feel. The storytelling is constantly shifting through archival material, stylized visual effects, and editing that almost turns recollection itself into the narrative engine. The past doesn’t feel distant or academic here. It feels volatile and alive, like the room itself is filled with ghosts of the people and movements they’re remembering. The editing is genuinely genius in how it lets conversations bounce off each other across time, turning arguments and stories into something that feels almost like a living debate with history itself. And visually the film looks gorgeous. Seeing this kind of archival material presented on such a rich print gives the whole experience a sense of weight.
But the real joy of the film is the personalities inside it. I don’t think I’ve ever watched a documentary where I walked away with a favorite character the same way I would from a narrative movie. For me it was Countee Cullen’s widow Ida Mae Cullen. Every time she appeared the energy shifted. Sharp, funny, a little intimidating, completely unwilling to let anyone else rewrite the story she lived through. She becomes the emotional anchor of the whole film.
Honestly it almost feels unfair to the rest of the slate but this might be the best thing I’ve seen at the festival so far. [A]
