‘Barbara Forever’ Review: A Loving and Intimate Tribute to a Queer Cinema Legend

It’s Sundance 1993, at the premiere of “Nitrate Kisses.” Early camcorder footage has that fuzzy desaturation where every indoor space is tinted with a warm beige. The lens is close up on a man’s face, both operator and subject surrounded by winter jackets and hardwood paneling. He deadpans to camera:  “I see more baby dykes running around than I ever have before, and that’s all your fault, Barbara.” Avant-garde filmmaker Barbara Hammer is on screen in the next shot, donning an ushanka and her trademark gap-toothed smile, happily surrounded by her fellow lesbians. 

Constructed primarily out of material from Hammer’s personal archive spanning half a century, Brydie O’Connor’s “Barbara Forever” is a sincere ode to the queer iconoclast. For gay cinephiles, it’s a historic gold mine, worth sifting through basically no matter the documentary’s actual quality. What a lovely relief it is, then, that the O’Connor’s film is worthy of its subject matter, faultlessly curated and illuminating in the instrumentation of its material.

The film is structured around Hammer’s life, top-to-bottom, with a few vital caveats. Though O’Connor moves chronologically, she does not begin in childhood. Hammer declares that while making her first film, “Schizy,” she was truly born, as an artist, a person, a feminist. O’Connor obliges this assertion, treating the tails of Hammer’s earliest 8mm reels as the far boundary of the documentary. “Barbara Forever” is committed to such flourishes, and full of stories that mythologize Hammer as an extension of political rhetoric. One of the greatest anecdotes is that the first woman Barbara sleeps with is the lover of the woman who taught her the word “lesbian.” The vision of second-wave feminism as a community of proud activists and prouder lovers is euphoric. As she puts it: “You dedicate your life to something you didn’t have words for at the beginning… why wouldn’t you historicize yourself?”

There are no talking heads here, minus a few current-day conversations between O’Connor and Florrie Burke, Hammer’s widow. The entire film is narrated by Hammer herself. There is no attempt to make it feel like one continuous voice-over. Mid-tangent, Barbara’s voice will suddenly become quieter, shakier, raspier. It is clear that these sections were recorded in poor health. “Barbara Forever” was born out of a decade-plus that O’Connor spent around Hammer (and Burke), a period of exchange between two generations of lesbian filmmakers. Though O’Connor herself never appears on-screen, her style is distinct and strong for a first feature; she avoids the common pitfall of many a documentary, where narrative feels obligatory and interstitial style feels extraneous. 

‘Barbara Forever’

It is a work made from a position of impassioned closeness, and O’Connor re-asserts a similar invitation to the audience via her form. There’s an ungenerous and shallow way to look at this film as little more than a highlight reel of Hammer’s work, a paltry substitute for actually spending meaningful time with the work itself. But O’Connor is not just doing summary work here. The critical work of contrasting artwork against contemporaneous ephemera builds a world of lesbianism, and makes Barbara’s aim to invent a new type of cinema — one that spoken to those around her — vividly felt. Hammer made “Audience,” a short comprised of interviews with her viewers, in 1982. At that Sundance 1992, someone asks Barbara if she’s making “Audience 2.” The joke turns out to be half-true, but it’s O’Connor, not Hammer, who makes that short’s truest successor. 

Hammer is aware from the beginning of her career that she is doing something fundamentally new, that she is laying the foundations of a sapphic experimental cinema (her film, “Dyketactics,” is widely considered the first publicly projected lesbian erotica made by actual lesbians). O’Connor smartly combines incidental footage Hammer took of her lovers with clips of shorts starring those same women. A motif that emerges in O’Connor’s film is the tension between Hammer’s experience of lesbianism as an internal, creative, and eventually force, and lesbianism as an external and resilient system of care. Her lovers often lament being filmed, even Burke. There is an unresolved weight to the role of being unofficial representative for a marginalized community, how that conflicts with being able to actually integrate all parts of yourself.

“Barbara” Forever does not merely chart the creative vectors of an artist’s mind, it also shows a lesbian woman as she ages — how her body and her demeanor shift and hold steadfast across a lifespan. “Nitrate Kisses,” Hammer’s first feature and her breakout success, is famous for its depiction of gay sex between elderly lovers. O’Connor carries on this tradition here by giving Hammer’s body a similarly affectionate but more expansive treatment. The film’s supposed linearity gets jumbled as the film goes on, and the edit often flashes across time with a series of match-cuts. One of Barbara’s favorite gestures is to flex her biceps and give a massive grin. The doc shows her pull out this move decade after decade. The cumulative effect of becoming so intimate with a queer person’s body, a body that is tactile and always in motion, is both devastating and life-affirming. Part of the reason this is so moving, of course, is because of the AIDS epidemic, a specter that lords over all late-century American queer culture. If there is a genuine shortcoming to the film, it is that O’Connor does not foreground this more, given it seems especially relevant to her ideas of mortality, inter-generational care, and tokenism in the art world.

In the end, both Hammer’s art and body are consumed by her battle with ovarian cancer. This is, in its own right, quite sensitively depicted and moving, right down to a gorgeous bit of foreshadowing from the prologue. But this, as the title suggests, is not the “real” conclusion of Hammer’s legacy. We are often shown the work of Barbara Hammer in the context of its archival; in galleries, in newspaper clippings, in the Yale library where this material now resides. This is in direct contrast to where the art lives: In Florrie’s testimony, in the faces of Hammer’s audiences, in the cutting room for the work of future lesbian filmmakers. At one point we see Hammer teach elementary students about experimental film. At a time when queerness is being systemically legislated out of classrooms, such a moment feels downright utopian.

The penultimate movement of the film follows her mentorship of Joey Carducci, who comes out as transmasculine to Barbara via the outtakes of Hammer’s “Tender Fictions,” a film where Hammer cross-dresses and wears a false mustache. It is no coincidence that this mirrors O’Connor’s experience of artistic actualization via ekphrasis. This is the story of a feminism, a lesbianism, an experimental cinema, that expands far beyond what its pioneers could have initially imagined. Such growth does not promote antagonism, or prompt future queer artists to disregard our elders. There is a beautiful responsibility implicitly demanded by scenes of Hammer and Carducci working together, to carry forth our history. In this way, Barbara is eternal. 

Grade: B+

“Barbara Forever” premiered at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.

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