Brydie O’Connor’s tenderly-crated feature debut Barbara Forever, world premiering in the U.S. Documentary Competition at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival, is as sensual, intimate and uninhibited as much of the work of its prolific subject, pioneering lesbian filmmaker Barbara Hammer.
Immediately drawing us into Hammer’s world, where the personal and artistic are interwoven, we hear the bright, lively voice of the filmmaker early in her career as she tests her microphones and enticingly remarks that it will be a “very intimate time with the camcorder tonight”. We then hear a much older Hammer reflect that her “life has been lived in film” as images of her naked, flexing her muscles in her early 30s give way to striking shots of the filmmaker towards the end of her life, again naked, as she faces aging and mortality through her art. Contemplating the correlation between the fragility of celluloid, which disintegrates over time, and human life. Such time jumps are sparingly but eloquently used by O’Connor to underscore Hammer’s consistent documentation of her life through her work.
With Hammer having so frequently turned her camera on herself, O’Connor wisely eschews “talking head” contributions from famous admirers, filmmaking peers, or cultural commentators to contextualize her life and oeuvre, which includes over 90 films made over five decades. Instead, she allows Hammer to tell her own narrative through deftly-selected excerpts from over 50 of those films, along with a wealth of previously unseen archive footage and photographs, accompanied by audio from extensive interviews with the filmmaker, weaving an involving, lyrical, and exquisitely layered tapestry.
As Barbara Forever traces Hammer’s commitment to creating “lesbian aesthetic films”—outsider, avant-garde art that doesn’t follow the rules—O’Connor similarly queers the mainstream documentary template. Anything that happened before Hammer came out is aptly only briefly covered, as the filmmaker describes how life began for her in earnest once she identified and embraced her lesbianism. “I was born when I became a lesbian”, she boldly asserts.
Hammer recounts that she did not encounter the word lesbian until she was 30 years old, but its definition immediately resonated. She went on to have her first sexual experience with the woman she heard the word from, recalling that as she greeted the dawn after a night spent making love, “in that moment I became a lesbian”. She had lost time to make up for, and Hammer describes her 30s as her “dyke adolescence”.
Having previously been married to a man, Hammer’s coming out in 1970 coincided with second wave feminism and the age of sexual liberation as she was exploring her own sexuality. She wanted to share the bliss she felt in her first sexual experiences with women in her work. She went on to make 13 films over the first eighteen months after coming out, featuring herself with the women she was intimate with. She had “many, many love affairs”, she recalls, and “each one of them inspired a new film”.
In one of the documentary’s most fascinating sequences, Hammer reflects on her continually bringing a camera into her relationships and how that changed the dynamics as she filmed their lives, making it hard for her to form deep connections with women as the lines blurred between her work and personal life. We glimpse a manipulative side to her as she encourages one of her lovers to agree to appear on film, while simultaneously recording her.
Her documentation of her friends and lovers led to what Hammer describes as “probably the first lesbian lovemaking film to be made by a lesbian” filmmaker, 1974’s Dyketactics, with its emphasis on touching and caressing, establishing a distinctly queer female gaze that invites and immerses rather than objectifies, as she sought to “bring back emotion to structural cinema”.
The absence of any lesbian representation in her life prior to her coming out spurred her to produce lesbian images for herself and other women, aware that she was not only making art but also creating “lesbian history in a world where we’re invisible”. A point that she asserts as she surveys her archives as she readies them to be sent to Yale, reflecting that the materials amount to “more than my life, it’s a history of queer art”. As a filmmaker she created with indefatigable energy and purpose, never in a vacuum. We witness enthusiastic interactions with her audience, leading to her 1982’s Audience, where she turned her camera on those engaging with her work.
Her prolificness, Hammer admits, was by design intended as a demand to be noticed. Her mother had wanted her to be a child actress in movies, like Shirley Temple, and Hammer traces her ambition for fame and recognition in adulthood back to impressing her second generation immigrant mother. Initially her films were shown in the Bay Area within the lesbian feminist community, but Hammer recalls her determination to reach a wider audience and to be taken seriously as an artist, which partly prompted her move to New York. When she got there, as O’Connor highlights, she was frustrated by not being taken seriously by the city’s white male dominated art world of the 1980s.
Hammer felt that her work was perceived as too lesbian to be embraced by the avant-garde film community and resented never being as widely known as she believed she ought to be. In her early years in New York, she felt she was being overlooked by the Museum of Modern Art’s film curators, but was confident enough in her own talent to keep sending them her new works. Major institutional acknowledgment finally came with the inclusion of Optic Nerve—a meditation on aging as she navigated the experience of putting her beloved grandmother into an old folks home—which was selected to be in the 1987 Whitney Biennial. “I felt I’d made it”, Hammers recalls.
Recognition of her work increased with the reception of her first feature, Nitrate Kisses, which Hammer describes as a conscious expansion of LGBTQ+ representation in her work. “If you’re not represented by one of your group you will be misrepresented”, she reflects, “old lesbians and old gay men, people of color, transgender, bisexual, even asexual history; these were images that were not shown”. Along with screening at the Berlin and Toronto film festivals, Nitrate Kisses played Sundance in 1993 where it was nominated for the Documentary Grand Jury Prize and formed part of the burgeoning queer new wave. Just a year earlier, Sundance had hosted the defining “Barbed-Wire Kisses” panel moderated by critic B. Ruby Rich, who originated the term New Queer Cinema. The panel featured prominent filmmakers of the movement such as Todd Haynes, whom we see speak. There is also a fun Sundance cameo from a young fellow lesbian filmmaker, Jenni Olson (a consulting producer on Barbara Forever, alongside Zackary Drucker), excitably saying that she is at the festival for all things lesbian, “that’s all that I care about”, which provokes a hearty laugh from Barbara.
O’Connor clearly admires her subject, but guided by Hammer’s self-reflections, the film emerges as an affectionate but clear-eyed tribute that captures the filmmaker’s spirit of rebellion and determination to forge her own path, while clearing the way for others to follow. Achieving what is so often missing in biographical documentaries, O’Connor penetrates beneath the surface to offer meaningful insight into Hammer’s artistic process. Truly independent, and fiercely experimental, Hammer continually found new forms and ways of working, such as the intergenerational collaboration with transmasculine filmmaker Joey Carducci, Generations in 2010, and her final work, the three-channel film and installation Evidentiary Bodies as she dealt with “living with” not “fighting” cancer.
Having written a thesis on Hammer’s early works, O’Connor went on to make the 2022 short film, Love, Barbara, which examines the filmmaker’s life and work through the eyes of her widow, Florrie Burke. Unlike many of her previous lovers, Florrie was an admittedly reluctant subject in Hammer’s films, though she acknowledges here that, ironically, she has been in front of a camera far more frequently since her death. A fact that she muses would likely make the late filmmaker “angry” if she knew. She has a compelling reason though, in fulfilling her pledge to keep Barbara’s work known and shown, mentioning that she receives daily requests from around the world to screen her films. The three-decade relationship between the women is a beautiful thread that runs through the second half of the film. Theirs is an affecting love story, delecately handled by O’Connor, and their deep feelings for and commitment to one another are palpable.
Editor Matt Hixon (an associate editor on All the Beauty and the Bloodshed) gives the film a captivating flow, allowing clips from Hammer’s work and archive footage space to breathe and for us to get immersed in them but knowing just when to move on. The selected visuals are often illustrative without—excuse the pun in advance—hammering the point home, as they are juxtaposed with insightful and reflective commentary from Hammer. In her selection of excerpts, O’Connor highlights the sensual nature of Hammer’s films along with the centering of herself and her experiences.
Following her work on the queer animated feature Bouchra, composer Taul Katz’s dreamy original score for Barbara Forever blends acoustic instrumentation with analogue synths to bring a stirring undercurrent of emotion without intruding on the visuals or manipulating the viewer. The film’s nuanced soundscape, including impactful use of silence, with Gisela Fullà Silvestre serving as supervising sound editor, draws us in as much as the visuals.
Towards the beginning of the film, we hear Barbara say “I want to exist forever”, echoed in the film’s title—we also catch a glimpse of a letter that she signed off with the words “Barbara Forever”—and this intoxicating and invigorating documentary will no doubt play a role in making those words ring true. In tracing Hammer’s artistic and personal life, and her legacy for queer and avant-garde filmmakers, this film is also primed to fulfill her ambition of reaching a larger audience with her work and receiving even more recognition than in her lifetime.
Barbara Forever is a profound work in its own right, life-affirming and inspiring, as well as much-needed lesbian history in a media landscape which remains severely lacking in authentic representation of queer women. Ultimately, we are left eager to explore or revisit Hammer’s work and empowered to pick up a camera ourselves and, as Barbara encouraged, to find new queer forms.
By James Kleinmann
Brydie O’Connor’s Barbara Forever received its world premiere at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival and screens again in-person on 28th (sold out), 30th, and 31st. The film is also available to watch online via Sundance from January 29th through February 1st, 2026. For more details and tickets head to festival.sundance.org.
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