Barbara Forever
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Back Already? The Maryland Film Festival Settles Into Its New Spring Dates
Only five months after its 2025 edition, the Maryland Film Festival hosted its 27th installment from April 8-12. The Parkway Theater on the corner of North & Charles is set to be a permanent home for Baltimore’s longest-running independent film festival, which will now be held annually in the spring. The shakeup caused by the festival going on hiatus in 2023—which caused former MdFF programmer Eric Allen Hatch to launch his own festival, New/Next, which now runs regularly in the fall—is finally starting to settle, leaving Baltimore with two marquee festivals for independent cinema. The 26th MdFF, despite the competition for regional […]
by Alex Lei on Apr 21, 2026 -
Barbara Forever, The Lake, Closure and Other Sundance Docs Still Seeking Distribution
For me, the fun of Sundance—and all festivals—is seeing not the films that everyone is buzzing about pre-fest (I can wait for the streaming release), but discovering the quieter gems that US distributors would do well to take a chance on. While this year’s nonfiction crop was weaker overall than 2025’s exceptional slate—which saw such cinematic revelations as Life After, The Perfect Neighbor and Seeds all competing in the US Documentary Competition—the docs that rose to the top, most notably the handful below, have continued to stay with me long after the final credits rolled in Park City. Barbara Forever […]
by Lauren Wissot on Feb 3, 2026 -
“Her Work Expanded What Lesbian Representation Could Look Like on Screen”: Brydie O’Connor on her Sundance-debuting Barbara Forever
“It’s been my own life that I’ve put on the screen,” pioneering artist Barbara Hammer says in VO as we witness her striking poses, flexing muscles, and standing defiantly naked before her lens. “My life has been lived in film.” Indeed, the taboo-shattering lesbian/avant-garde filmmaker, who died of ovarian cancer at the age of 79 in 2019, left behind an archive comprised of 80 films, along with a treasure trove of unreleased footage, audio interviews, personal photos and more. It’s an extraordinary body of work, put to skilled cinematic use by Brydie O’Connor—who likewise collaborated with Hammer’s widow Florrie Burke […]
by Lauren Wissot on Jan 24, 2026
