The best thing about Brydie O’Connor’s documentary Barbara Forever is how it functions as an interesting, engaging movie on its own terms. It concerns the life of filmmaker Barbara Hammer, a pioneer of queer cinema and larger, cultural queer identity. And while there are plenty of films and archival photos and video to tell Hammer’s story, O’Connor is smart to never make this feel like homework. It is ultimately much more than a celebration of a great artist (Hammer passed away in 2019). Too often do these profiles of artists play it safer than said artist ever would. Barbara Forever does not do that. It often feels like a Barbara Hammer film itself while evolving into a sharp, clever montage that moves fast and entertains throughout. It’s funny and disarming and, ultimately, quietly uplifting.
“Isn’t it curious how women use a mirror?” The question is asked in voiceover, played over a series of striking images. Much like Hammer’s films, Barbara Forever is deeply curious about small, personal tendencies and larger questions of legacy at the same time. Not only the legacy of Hammer herself but of the people she was championing in her work. Her totemic 1992 first feature Nitrate Kisses gets its proper due here, and her voice carries the majority of the narrative. She investigates her own personal history, the motivations behind her art, and her enduring hope to be more well-known. She wrote in her memoir Hammer!, “I want to be famous. I want to walk into a room and be introduced as Barbara Hammer, the woman artist who has given us so much of herself.” Yet her ego and ambition never seemed to get in the way of her activism and progressive aesthetics.
There is such love and curiosity in Hammer’s frames—of the human body, of queer intimacy. The film opens and closes on Hammer’s very own beautiful, bare body. It’s fascinating to think that many of the images presented in this documentary now feel quaint, one measure of Hammer’s success in bringing an entire group of marginalized people into the foreground. There is a particularly striking sequence wherein Hammer announces her ovarian cancer diagnosis. What follows is a minutes-long phantasmagorical montage of X-ray images and internal body camera footage that melts into broken celluloid, complemented beautifully by Taul Katz’s score. It’s one of the more affecting experimental passages this critic has watched in some time.
And then there is Hammer’s look. Those amazing eyeglasses; that striking, short gray hair. Early on, she recalls filming through bifocal lenses so as to obstruct the frame and find something new. Later on, she feels compelled to film the light piercing through her saline bag provided during chemotherapy. She can’t help herself; she needs to capture it. Barbara Forever demands that you watch or rewatch Hammer’s deep, fascinating filmography, while excelling as its own entertaining work of art.
Barbara Forever premiered at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival.