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Once Upon a Time in Harlem is a crucial reclamation of the Harlem Renaissance, an increasingly neglected period of African American history, but also of the legacy of the film’s director. William Greaves made more than a hundred nonfiction films in his life. And he had just as many unrealized ideas, including four planned sequels to his best-known work, the unclassifiable Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One from 1968. But in his later years, he was adamant that the raw footage he and his skeleton crew shot at a party at Duke Ellington’s apartment in 1972, a reunion of sorts for many Harlem Renaissance icons, was the greatest thing he ever filmed. After his death, Greaves’ decades-in-the-making passion project passed to his son David. Now Once Upon a Time in Harlem has finally been realized. Apart from being a fascinating and important historical record, commemorating and enshrining this period’s lasting legacy, this movie is quite simply a killer party. Memories ricochet around the room with increasing velocity as the event rolls on; libations loosen the atmosphere as some of the most influential Black writers, thinkers, artists, and entertainers of this or any era reminisce about what was and what could have been. In the partygoers’ lively discussions, and especially in their passionate disagreements, the Harlem Renaissance remains just as vital fifty years on, and a hundred years on. ~OO