Harlem Renaissance documentary finally gets global premiere 50 years after cameras rolled

In 1969, the pioneering documentarian William Greaves wrote of his fury over the racially degrading stereotypes that white film producers threw up on American screens. “It became clear to me that unless we black people began to produce information for screen and television there would always be a distortion of the ‘black image,’” he said. Three years later, Greaves began work on what he considered the most important footage he ever shot: a feature documentary gathering surviving figures of the Harlem Renaissance to reflect on the movement they had built half a century earlier. Now, more than 50 years after cameras rolled, Once Upon a Time in Harlem is finally receiving its international premiere in Cannes’ Directors’ Fortnight – completed not by William Greaves, who died in 2014, but by his son David and granddaughter Liani. The documentary centres on a cocktail party Greaves hosted at Duke Ellington ’s townhouse in Harlem in August 1972 – an attempt to capture the voices of artists, writers, musicians and organisers whose work had transformed Black American culture in the 1920s, but whose stories were already at risk of being sidelined. Greaves invited every surviving participant he could locate. Many had not seen one another for decades. …