Documentary about the Harlem Renaissance finally made its international debut 50 years after the cameras rolled | Documentary films

In 1969, pioneer William Greaves wrote about his anger at the racially offensive stereotypes that white filmmakers had thrown onto American screens. “It became clear to me that if we black people started to release information on TV and radio, there would always be a distortion of the ‘black image’,” he said.

Three years later, Greaves began work on what he considered to be his most important piece of photography: a series of posthumous recordings. Harlem Renaissance to think about the movement he built 50 years ago.

Now, 50 years after the cameras rolled, Sometime in Harlem It finally received its world premiere in the Cannes ‘Directors’ Fortnight – completed not by William Greaves, who died in 2014, but by his son David and his granddaughter Liani.

The script takes place at a Greaves dinner party that is held Duke EllingtonA town hall in Harlem in August 1972 – an attempt to capture the voices of artists, writers, musicians and organizers whose works changed American society in the 1920s, but whose stories were already in danger of being isolated.

Greaves called everyone else he could find. Many had not seen each other for years. They included artist Aaron Douglas; artist and great writer Richard Bruce Nugent; poet Arna Bontemps; singers Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle; photographer James Van Der Zee; and Ida Mae Cullen, widow of Countee Cullen.

For four hours, Greaves filmed them laughing, reminiscing and arguing. The following video follows the theme of the party: random greetings and fond memories slowly lead to conflicts about politics, language and heritage.

David Greaves, who was there in 1972 aged 22, worked as a painter under his father. “I knew about the people involved and how important it was,” he told the Guardian. “My dad thought they were amazing, and we had to catch them.”

Duke Ellington was also not well and did not attend, but his sister Ruth was present. “There were four cameras, two workers walking around the house talking, little time between them,” David said. “Most of the time my dad just let them be free, it was fluid.”

One of the film’s strengths is that openness. At one point, foreigners debated whether the word “Negro” should be discarded in favor of “Afro-American”. Elsewhere, he discusses Marcus Garvey and Langston Hughes and the global recurrence of anti-colonialism. Aaron Douglas reflects on jazz, telling the room: “It might have seemed like a change to some music. It wasn’t a change to us.”

For David Greaves, the conversation is clear. “When they talk about calling themselves black or Negro, that conversation is still going on today — you have black people, African Americans, people of different races.”

He points to a video in the film of Haile Selassie’s 1936 appeal to the League of Nations after the Italian war in Ethiopia. As he prepared it, he thought Volodymyr Zelenskyy seeking international support after Russia’s war in Ukraine. Selassie was not helped, but Zelenskyy was.

The film also reminds viewers of the recent violence in America. David points to the images accompanying the anti-lynching poem The Lynching, ending with a white girl watching what he calls “fiendish glee”.

“He would have been the same age as my father, which means his son would have been my age, his grandson the same age as my daughter,” he said. “All three of us vote. The US is not far from that time, only three generations.

For him, the film comes at a time when Black history is under attack again in the US. He was asked about Donald Trump’s latest attack on the Smithsonian on national programs, he said: “Look and think, Jesus, who is this?”

He also said: “They have been doing everything in their power to erase the Black experience in America, even removing the signs from the park.” What this film does is to show a group of amazing people who were there talking 50 years ago, and about what is happening to them.

These scenes were originally shot but not used in Greaves’ 1974 documentary From These Roots. Although he went on to make many other films, including the experimental documentary Symbiopsychotaxiplasm, he never completed the Harlem project that is closest to his heart.

After William’s death, the story went to his widow Louise, who continued to work until her death in 2023. David and Liani then took over, restoring and filming 60,000 16mm film.

By doing this, David said that he understood his father a lot. By reading notes in his books on Eastern philosophy, he found the wisdom of conversations that William often had about pain, suffering and insight. “He was a much richer man than I thought,” he said, laughing.

As he was making the final cut, he followed one of his father’s moral principles: “My father used to say that if something catches your eye, go for it.”

The unfinished film was shown in pieces in 2024 and 2025, to which he quickly responded. Richard Brody of the New Yorker called it “one of the great talking heads” he had seen.

David, who has spent the past three decades publishing Our Time Press, a Brooklyn-based newspaper that focuses on black people and culture, and his wife, Bernice Green, said they hope to release the film in time for Greaves’ centenary in October, with historical events planned in New York and at the Barbican in London.

He said: “My father was admired by people who knew film, but he didn’t have the respect he has now. This film should encourage him to become a historian of African Americans.”