WILLIAM GREAVES 100, a one-week retro commemorating the pioneering avant-garde, genre-defying filmmaker on his centennial, including early acting and feature films spanning documentary, narrative, and hybrid forms, will run Friday, Oct 23 through Thu, Oct 29 at Film Forum.

Over the course of 52 years, William Greaves (1926-2014) created an immense body of work as producer, writer, director, cinematographer and editor that documented and celebrated the Black experience.

Of his transition from acting to producing and directing, Greaves said he was infuriated by the racially degrading stereotypes that white film producers put on American screens.

It became clear to him that unless Black people began producing their own work for screen and TV, there would always be distortion of the “Black image.”

Lost Boundaries

Says Ina Archer, artist and curator: “The series also showcases Greaves’ early career as actor (he was trained at the Actors Studio), including a stand-out performance in Lost Boundaries (1949), a landmark movie about a family passing as white in small New Hampshire town, based on a true story.

The shorts include “industrial” films made by Bill while he was at the Film Board of Canada. You’ll see in these films, through his different roles, first as  editor and then as writer and director, the sensibilities he would employ in later work, like the playfulness of PUTTING IT STRAIGHT (1957), about orthodontics for children; an unflinching but humanistic gaze for EMERGENCY WARD (1959); and the kind of hybrid, experimental reportage style he developed in segments for TV’s Black Journal, and in STILL A BROTHER: INSIDE THE NEGRO MIDDLE CLASS (1968).”

“This retrospective is also an opportunity to show the three films that inform the decades-long ONCE UPON A TIME IN HARLEM project, highlighting themes that resonated throughout Greaves’ career.

THE FIRST WORLD FESTIVAL OF NEGRO ARTS (1966) establishes the centrality of Africa and jazz in the historical and cultural flourishing of the Harlem Renaissance and in his ideas of Black media-making;

FROM THESE ROOTS (1974), the predecessor to ONCE UPON A TIME IN HARLEM; and SYMBIOPSYCHOTAXIPLASM: TAKE ONE (1968)—and TWO ½ —which brings together multilayered, crossing points of view, split screens, storytelling, and a controlled chaotic structure that is ultimately captured by the brilliant party that is ONCE UPON A TIME IN HARLEM.”

Says author and historian Donald Bogle: “Bill was the consummate documentary filmmaker: insightful, thoughtful, probing, a master of diverse and unexpected topics, forever provocative, and forever illuminating.”

ONCE UPON A TIME IN HARLEM

Directed by Greaves’ son David and conceived and filmed by William Greaves –an extraordinary chronicle of a never-before-seen 1972 gathering of Harlem Renaissance luminaries premieres Friday, October 16 at Film Forum.

The documentary had its world premiere at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival, was selected for the prestigious Directors’ Fortnight section at the Cannes Film Festival and the Main Slate of the New York Film Festival, screened at the Telluride Film Festival, and Toronto International Film Festival – the only film to play at each major festival.

Special events in the series include introductions by David and Liani Greaves; post-film conversation with Donald Bogle and Film Forum Artistic Director Bruce Goldstein, after the Friday, October 23, 5:50 screening of Lost Boundaries.

William Greaves 100 has been curated by Ina Archer.