Spotlight on pioneering American filmmaker William Greaves
A spotlight on the pioneering American filmmaker whose genre-defying films turned the camera on Black history, collective struggle, and the act of filmmaking itself.
IDFA presents a spotlight on pioneering American filmmaker, producer, editor and actor William Greaves (1926–2014), bringing a rediscovered voice in cinema back into view. Across a formally inventive filmography shaped by sharp observation of social and political life, Greaves explored Black history and culture, collective action and the tensions that emerge when people come together.
The spotlight includes the newly completed Once Upon a Time in Harlem (2026), an extraordinary cinéma vérité film shot on 16mm, capturing a 1972 reunion of key Harlem Renaissance figures in Duke Ellington’s apartment, completed posthumously by Greaves’ son and granddaughter David and Liani Greaves.
Cult classic Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One (1971), in which Greaves turns a Central Park fiction shoot into a self-reflective study of a film crew in revolt, and the electrifying portrait of the build-up to the Joe Frazier–Muhammad Ali championship bout, The Fight [The William Greaves Director’s Cut] (1973), reveal Greaves’s signature method: lensing a spectacle, then turning his camera to the social performances and tensions that gather around it.
Once Upon a Time in Harlem