Neon has partnered with Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s office to host four free screenings of Once Upon a Time in Harlem across New York City this weekend. Screenings take place Saturday, October 24, and Sunday, October 25, at AMC Magic Johnson Harlem, Film Forum, and Film at Lincoln Center, with RSVPs available online.
Directed and filmed by the late William Greaves in 1972, the documentary centers on a cocktail party Greaves hosted at Duke Ellington’s Harlem home, bringing together every surviving creator of the Harlem Renaissance he could locate, many of whom hadn’t seen each other in more than 50 years. For four hours, the group laughed, drank, and debated their place in a rapidly shifting cultural landscape, all of it captured on film. The footage originally belonged to a different Greaves project, From These Roots, completed in 1974 using only archival materials, which meant these specific interviews sat unused for decades. Greaves, who went on to complete over 70 films and become a major figure in American independent cinema, considered this footage his greatest work and spent much of the rest of his life trying to finish it. He died in 2014 with the film still incomplete; his widow Louise Greaves continued the effort until her death in 2023, at which point his son David Greaves and granddaughter Liani Greaves took over the project, with producer Anne de Mare overseeing the restoration and digitization of the original footage.
Mayor Mamdani called the film a way of bringing the personalities and debates of the Harlem Renaissance “to life for a new generation of New Yorkers,” framing the free screenings as a way to ensure broad access to the film and describing the city’s continued debt to the artists of that era, whose influence he said still shapes jazz, galleries, and ongoing movements for social justice. A sitting mayor’s office directly partnering with a distributor to offer free public screenings reflects an unusually hands-on approach to cultural programming, treating a documentary’s local release not just as entertainment but as civic education tied to the city’s own history.
The film is the only 2026 release to screen at Sundance, Cannes, Telluride, Toronto, and the New York Film Festival, and is nominated for five Critics Choice Documentary Awards, including Best Documentary. It previously won the 2026 Library of Congress Lavine/Ken Burns Film Prize and the Maysles Film Center Albie Award. Neon acquired the film following its Sundance premiere, outbidding Netflix and Mubi, and released it theatrically earlier this month, timed to William Greaves’ centenary.
With free public screenings now extending the film’s reach well beyond its festival and awards circuit, the real story is how many New Yorkers encounter this footage for the first time precisely where it was originally filmed, more than five decades after Greaves first captured it.