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Sundance 2026 Quick Takes
Once Upon a Time in Harlem While the East digs out from under feet of snow and ice, Park City is dry as a bone. Desiccated slopes encircling Main Street are gray and bare, devoid of powder or skiers. Meanwhile, Main Street, a pedestrian mall during the festival’s first weekend, is buzzier than ever, packed with Sundancers under sunny skies reveling at the festival’s last rodeo in Utah. The only precipitation in the forecast is another blizzard of great indie films.
Last night’s premiere of Once Upon a Time in Harlem was the film’s first public screening ever, and it was met with two standing ovations. Assembled from footage shot in 1972 by several 16mm cameras under the direction of the late, great Harlem-born filmmaker William Greaves, it depicts a reunion of key artists and significant figures in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s. They had been invited to a gathering in Duke Ellington’s Harlem townhouse by Greaves himself for the purpose of making a film about the Harlem Renaissance. These cultural luminaries, though elderly by 1972, had lost none of their fire, and their exchanges are scintillating. But for myriad reasons, this footage was never completely edited. Greaves’ son, David Greaves, who was camera crew on the shoot, now shares co-directing credit with his father. If you don’t know what the Harlem Renaissance was, you need to see this film. If you do know what the Harlem Renaissance was, you need to see this film. I think Once Upon a Time in Harlem will be hailed as essential viewing for anyone interested in modern American cultural history. In fact, during the Q&A, a man in the audience stood up to exclaim that Once Upon a Time in Harlem is one of the best films he’d ever seen. Blinded by the bright lights onstage, the filmmakers couldn’t make out the speaker. That man was Barry Jenkins.
Barbara Forever is director Brydie O’Connor’s intimate and poetic biographical homage to the late experimental film director Barbara Hammer. I was acquainted with Barbara somewhat, but watching Barbara Forever, I was floored by little I really knew about her. Real artists are compulsive; compelled to make art; they can’t help themselves. Barbara was such an artist. Of course core to her creative drive and output was her lesbianism, which infuses every frame of her filmmaking. But I was struck again by her genius at layering and superimposing film images, her mastery of her JK optical printer. O’Connors’s film itself is similarly layered and lyrical. Special mention must be made of Taul Katz’s score, which contributes to making Barbara Forever a transporting experience throughout. This is a film I would assign as required viewing to any class studying experimental filmmaking, not in spite of but because of the uninhibited candor that made Barbara’s oeuvre so distinctive. [Since this was written, Barbara Forever editor Matt Hixon has won the Jonathan Oppenheim Editing Award: U.S. Documentary.]
The Gallerist is a droll sendup of art-word pretension, a fat target if ever there was one. I’m tempted to call it a skewering, but that’s what happens literally to Zach Galifianakis, who plays a wheedling, self-important art-world influencer as a corpse for all but the film’s opening sequence. A friend of mine, a veteran art critic, dismissed the film as a heap of clichés and quipped that The Gallerist is for those who read about the art world in the New York Post. Maybe so, but it tickled my funny bone throughout. (Note: real-life art-speak causes my eyes to roll.) The ensemble of Natalie Portman, Jenna Ortega, Sterling K. Brown, Galifianakis, Da’Vine Joy Randolph, and Catherine Zeta-Jones couldn’t be more delectable. In fact, I didn’t recognize Zeta-Jones until the credits, so archly stylized is her performance. I also appreciated director Cathy Yan’s bag of camera tricks, including flying her Steadicam (or gimbal) through walls and tilting her flying camera at “Dutch angles” at moments of peak chaos.
Speaking of cameras on the move, Nuisance Bear is a superb showcase for what gimbaled cameras can accomplish artistically. Melting polar icecaps have caused polar bears in Manitoba to spend more time on land looking for food, and this brings them in greater contact with garbage dumps and human settlements in general. But Nuisance Bear is no nature film. An on-camera Inuit elder sets up the story by recalling that the traditional separation of humans and bears is based on mutual fear and respect, now undermined by human activity and hubris. Onscreen we follow the travails of several bears searching for food, as well as Inuit efforts to scare them off or remove them to remote locations for their own safety. Always the camera slowly dollies, whether in closeup or wide shot. How do you get close enough to an imposing polar bear in the wild to frame it in a lyrical traveling shot? How do you slowly track into what looks like a gale-force snowstorm? As detailed in this interview of directors Gabriela Osio Vanden and Jack Weisman by Vadim Rizov, the answer is cars outfitted with gimbal devices that stabilize a camera with a long lens, including the sort of six-axis gimbal used in helicopter mounts. The results are consistently breathtaking, atmospherically enhanced by composer Cristóbal Tapia de Veer’s striking score. [Since this was written, Nuisance Bear has won the U.S. Grand Jury Prize: Documentary.]
If you liked three seasons on HBO of John Wilson’s half-hour show How To With John Wilson, as I did, you’ll be inclined to like his new feature film version, The History of Concrete. Audiences will have to decide whether Wilson’s quirky style—street-level serendipity as a philosophical point of departure for wry musings and countless visual puns—bears up under three times the running length of the TV original.
Knife, based on Salman Rushdie’s 2024 book of the same name, about the 2022 attempt on his life by a knife-wielding fanatic while onstage in front of a horrified audience at the famed Chautauqua summer resort, comes to us courtesy of master documentary maker Alex Gibney. As a result, we know we’re in for exceptional filmmaking. This time, Gibney relies entirely on a novel level of intimacy: the proficient, sometimes first-person, video camerawork of Rushdie’s wife, Rachel Eliza Griffiths, an accomplished photographer and published poet. She is with him in the hospital shortly after the attack and records on camera in graphic, sometimes shocking, detail his numerous injuries, including his damaged, distended right eye, which was blinded. It’s clear that from the get-go, Rushdie and Griffiths had resolved to video as much as possible, to show the world what they were going through, physically and emotionally, up to and including their return to the Chautauqua Institution to revisit the scene of the crime, which yields a satisfying closure. A must for fans of Rushdie, and Gibney fans too.
Another exceptionally well-produced documentary based on a book is Soul Patrol, the title of which has a nice ring to it, suggesting future screenplay potential. African American author Ed Emanuel wrote the 2003 memoir of the same name to commemorate the camaraderie that binds for life fellow members of an elite all-Black reconnaissance patrol in 1968 Vietnam, when they were 18 and 19 years old. The film sets the stage by depicting the era’s signature backdrops: assassinations, inner city rioting, white racism, Black nationalism, fear of communism, set to popular Motown hits. Structured around a reunion of elderly patrol survivors who also reminisce in voiceover, Soul Patrol is illustrated by Super 8 footage taken in Vietnam by patrol members themselves as well as battle reenactments featuring a handful of impressive young actors impersonating those patrol members. Scarcely mentioned is drug use or, for that matter, Vietnamese combatants or villagers that crossed paths with these trained killers who freely admit they carried their rage into battle. Word of mouth for Soul Patrol is strong however. [Since this was written, Soul Patrol director J.M. Harper has won the Directing Award: U.S. Documentary.]
Long before there was a dark net or even internet, there was public access TV. Now, you may think you have a vague idea of what public access TV once was, or what remains of it today, but only those like myself who lived in New York City in the 1970s and ’80s at the dawn of cable TV truly understand the radical cultural experiment that took place only in the New York City pay-TV market. Cable companies were then required by local law to dedicate a handful of TV channels to the public at large, the idea being that this would remove the profit motive from TV and unleash a First Amendment, freedom-of-expression gold rush of local citizens and communities producing authentic content, thereby airing their own concerns and perspectives. This idealistic initiative soon gave way to a cornucopia of non-ironic mediocrity, small-time schmaltz, would-be TV psychics, and plenty of male and female nudity, sexualized and otherwise. It also opened the door to the very first dedicated gay programming (as AIDS loomed), downtown music scene coverage (Talking Heads, Blondie, Patti Smith, The Cramps), and social/political justice advocacy (DeeDee Halleck’s Paper Tiger Television). The Sundance documentary that explores this anarchic rupture in TV’s once tightly controlled landscape is simply titled Public Access. Directed by David Shadrack Smith, exec-produced by Steve Buscemi and Bennie Safdie, it joins Once Upon a Time in Harlem as essential viewing for those interested in modern American cultural history.
Contributing editor David Leitner has director, producer, and DP credits in eight Sundance premieres, including 1989 Grand Jury and Audience Award winner for documentary, For All Mankind.
