Harlem Renaissance Dinner Party Comes To Life 54 Years Later

The salon is back in Harlem, honey, and we don’t mean for finger waves or box braids. 

Soon enough, the masses will be able to peer into an exclusive cocktail party at Duke Ellington’s Harlem brownstone via Once Upon a Time in Harlem, a film by documentarian William Greaves, which will be released 54 years after it was shot. 

Once Upon A Time in Harlem is a masterclass in cinema verite; it was filmed on 16mm during a 1972 cocktail party conceived and planned by Greaves, and filled with a coterie of Harlem Renaissance royalty: painter Aaron Douglas, writer Richard Bruce Nugent, artist Romare Bearden, composer Eubie Blake, photographer James Van Der Zee, poet Arna Bontemps, actor Leigh Whipper, activist Louise Thompson Patterson, and Ida Mae Cullen, the widow of Countee Cullen — mixing, mingling, drinking, debating and reminiscing at the Harlem home of Sir Duke Ellington, some after decades of not seeing one another.

The Playlist reports that Greaves, director of Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One and a director-producer of Black Journal, considered the footage among the most important material he ever captured. 

Greaves passed away in 2014, but his son David Greaves, who was a cameraman on the 1972 shoot, picked up the mantle and directed this Black historical gem. David gives his father special billing on the project– “conceived and directed by William Greaves” – and it is produced by Liana Greaves and Anne de Mare, who edited it alongside Lynn True; the music is composed by Harlem Geechee Goddess, Tamar-Kali.

Once Upon a Time in Harlem debuted at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival, and also showed at Cannes; it will hit Telluride, TIFF, the BFI London Film Festival, and the  New York Film Festival before opening wide in theaters on October 16. 

In an especially poignant Sundance review of the film, the writer touches on the nuance of the conversations captured that night, and just how special this kind of documentation is for Black history. 

“The best choice that either Greaves makes is simply letting the conversations play out with minimal edits,” he writes. “Rather than just showing these thinkers reciting their greatest hits, the longform discussions showcase all of the contradictions (and occasional rifts) between members of the same movement. It deprives viewers of the chance to oversimplify the Harlem Renaissance as a monolithic group of people who all believed the same thing. The inevitable nuance that arises from letting people express their actual thoughts for long enough is likely to be the film’s greatest legacy.”

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

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