A 1972 reunion in Harlem becomes an awards-season contender
Director David Greaves and producer Liani Greaves have told the story behind Once Upon a Time in Harlem on Deadline's Doc Talk podcast, after the film collected five nominations for the Critics Choice Documentary Awards Deadline.
The edition was published on 13 October 2026. Doc Talk is hosted by John Ridley and Matt Carey and is a production of Deadline and Ridley's No Studios.
The film is an oral history of the Harlem Renaissance built around a single gathering. In 1972, surviving members of that generation of Black artists, writers and musicians met at the home of Duke Ellington, and the reunion was filmed.
That footage is the heart of the new documentary. It was shot by William Greaves, the pioneering documentarian who is David's father and Liani's grandfather. The production was then crafted from almost 30 hours of raw material.
David Greaves was there from the start. He worked as one of the original cameramen on the 1972 shoot, before returning decades later to direct the feature with his daughter producing.
The festival run has been unusually wide. The film premiered at Sundance, then screened at Cannes, Telluride, Toronto and New York Deadline. It is the only documentary to play all four of those festivals this year.
Five nominations puts it in a tight pack. You Can See Everything and Nuisance Bear also have five nominations each at the 11th Annual Critics Choice Documentary Awards The Hollywood Reporter. 14th leads the field with six, including Best Documentary Feature Critics Choice Association.
The Harlem film already has one major prize. It won the Library of Congress Lavine Ken Burns Prize for Film, announced in September Deadline.
What makes this stand out is the wait. Fifty-four years passed between the cameras rolling in Ellington's living room and the finished film reaching voters. For viewers, that means hearing the story directly from the people who lived it, preserved on film and finished by their own family.
