Overview
- NEON released the trailer Thursday, Sept. 3, ahead of a planned theatrical opening on October 16 that begins the film’s commercial run.
- The documentary is built from four hours of 16mm footage shot in 1972 at a gathering of surviving Harlem Renaissance figures at Duke Ellington’s Harlem townhouse.
- William Greaves filmed the original material but died in 2014, and his son David Greaves assembled and directed the finished film with editors Lynn True and Anne de Mare.
- The film premiered at Sundance and then played Cannes’ Directors’ Fortnight, Telluride, TIFF, the BFI London Film Festival, and the New York Film Festival, an unusually wide festival tour for a single documentary.
- The restoration and family-led completion turn a long-unseen oral history into a public record that may reshape scholarship and popular views of the Harlem Renaissance while opening the film to awards-season consideration.