Once Upon a Time in Harlem Review: A Clarion Call Cocktail Composed of Hope, Intellectualism, and Righteous Fury

9 hours ago 13

Published Jan 26, 2026, 4:00 PM EST

Gregory Nussen is the Lead Film Critic for Screen Rant. They have previously written for Deadline Hollywood, Slant Magazine, Backstage and Salon. Other bylines: In Review Online, Vague Visages, Bright Lights Film Journal, The Servant, The Harbour Journal, Boing Boing Knock-LA & IfNotNow's Medium. They were the recipient of the 2022 New York Film Critics Circle Graduate Prize in Criticism, and are a proud member of GALECA, the Society of LGBTQ Entertainment Critics. They co-host the Great British Baking Podcast. Gregory also has a robust performance career: their most recent solo performance, QFWFQ, was nominated for five awards, winning Best Solo Theatre at the Hollywood Fringe Festival in 2025.

Once Upon a Time in Harlem is a miracle. A clarion call from across space and time, like a message in a bottle, its very existence is a wild gift. Black filmmaking pioneer William Greaves, now dead for twelve years, has somehow reached us from the beyond, with a documentary that reminds us just how essential intellectual conversation, debate and collaborative art all are to the needs of social progress.

Shot in August 1972 but finished in time for the 2026 Sundance Film Festival by his son, David, and granddaughter, Liani, Once Upon a Time in Harlem gathers together an inspiring line of totems of the Harlem Renaissance at the home of Duke Ellington. As much a testament to the tenacity of spirit of a bygone generation of Black leadership as it is to the power of a good cocktail party, The Greaves' family documentary is nothing if not an endorsement for archival preservation.

William Greaves' purpose on that day in 1972 was to capture a moment of reflection that could extend in both directions. At that time, it was an opportunity to relitigate what methodologies of Black liberation worked and what didn't; in its current state it is a reminder, both comforting and sobering, that some fights are perpetual.

Greaves' most lasting work to date is the seminal Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One, a metatheatrical documentary shot four years before Once Upon a Time in Harlem that blasted open the gates of what the form could be. Like 8 1/2 before it, Greaves' film dallies with the line between reality and fiction, in a piece that is as much about the capturing of the moment as it is about the moment itself.

Once Upon a Time in Harlem is edited by producers Anne de Mare and Lynn True, and in such a way that recalls Symbiopsychotaxiplasm in both form and function. There's a magical mirroring here in the way that Greaves (and his son and granddaughter) are also caught on camera in the act of directing or asking questions of the film's subjects. The film is instructional and implicitly argues that the act of recording these conversations and debates may be just as important as what those conversations are.

The Harlem Renaissance was an explosion of revolutionary Black political thought and artistic output. Capturing and curating this particular group's ruminations on their experiences of it is a monumental task, but David Greaves not only assembles the right footage but laces it together with poetry readings of Zora Neale Thurston and Claude McKay's poetry and essays, plus just enough graphic work to situate us.

It is a blueprint borne out of mutual respect, collaboration, and reverence for those that came before us, paving a path not with gentleness but with righteous fury.

Of the debates contained therein, a few stand out for their astonishing prescience. Artist Richard B. Moore argues that the late Langston Hughes' is wrong to consider the need to be labeled as a Black artist and not simply an American one. Marcus Garvey's return to Africa plan is dissected and argued over for its relative success or failure, depending on who you ask. Actor Leigh Whipper reflects on his stage work, reciting monologues and ruefully admitting to an off-camera Greaves that he doesn't believe the younger generation know - or perhaps care at all - about the elder generation's struggles.

With so much of the conversation inside this mesmerizing, nearly fifty-six-year-old document still relevant, Once Upon a Time in Harlem could come across as disheartening. After all, shouldn't we have solved many of these issues already? Many of these subjects clearly believe that should be the case. But so much social ill does persist, and at least it is helpful to have a blueprint of how the world can continue to turn in the right direction. It is a blueprint borne out of mutual respect, collaboration, and reverence for those that came before us, paving a path not with gentleness but with righteous fury. It's a blueprint we could all stand to study more of, yesterday.