‘Once Upon a Time in Harlem’ Trailer: William Greaves’ Portrait of Harlem Renaissance Luminaries Is a Living Piece of History

From the moment it premiered at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival, it was clear that “Once Upon a Time in Harlem” was a monumental event in the nonfiction film space. The final film from the late “Symbiopsychotaxiplasm” director William Greaves — shot in 1972 before being finished by his son David half a century later — assembles many of the leading artists and intellectuals from the Harlem Renaissance for a cocktail party at Duke Ellington’s home to discuss their legacy.

The finished film takes a hands-off approach, as Greaves’ camera is content to sit back and let conversations between luminaries play out uninterrupted. The end result is a vital historical artifact that illustrates the wide range of ideas that comprised the Harlem Renaissance and pushes back against the idea that the cultural movement could be easily simplified.

“After watching ‘Once Upon a Time in Harlem,’ it becomes a lot harder to hold onto any specific conclusions about the Harlem Renaissance that you picked up from a high school textbook,” I wrote in my Sundance review. “The film makes it clear how passionate some of these people were about radical economic policies, not just jazz and poetry and civil rights like some would have you believe. More than that, it makes it clear that the Renaissance was less of an organized movement than a group of brilliant thinkers whose proximity to each other at a specific time in their lives made them all sharper. Disagreement and contradiction are a necessary component of that dynamism, because these are all distinct individuals — something that ‘Once Upon a Time in Harlem’ lays out clearly.”

David Greaves is credited as the film’s sole director, though his father is uniquely billed as having “conceived and filmed” the documentary. The film was produced by Liana Greaves and Anne de Mare, who edited it alongside Lynn True.

The film followed its Sundance premiere with a screening at the Cannes Film Festival, with stops at the Telluride, Toronto, and New York Film Festivals ahead in the coming weeks. And it won’t be long before every cinephile has a chance to experience the film, as Neon will release it theatrically on October 16.

Watch the trailer for “Once Upon a Time in Harlem” below.