The remarkable life and groundbreaking artistry of pioneering filmmaker Barbara Hammer take center stage in Barbara Forever, a visually inventive documentary that celebrates one of the most influential voices in queer cinema.
Directed by Brydie O’Connor in her feature directorial debut, the film crafts an intimate portrait using Hammer’s own words, rare archival materials, home movies, photographs, and excerpts from her expansive body of work. Rather than following a conventional biography, Barbara Forever immerses audiences in Hammer’s creative vision and enduring legacy. The documentary features Barbara Hammer through archival footage alongside interviews and reflections from her longtime partner Florrie Burke and those who helped preserve her extraordinary artistic legacy.
Barbara Forever had its world premiere at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival, where it won the Jonathan Oppenheim Editing Award, before going on to screen at the Berlin International Film Festival (Berlinale), where it won the Teddy Award for Best Documentary, the San Francisco Frameline Film Festival where it won the Outstanding Documentary Feature Award, the Provincetown International Film Festival where it won a Special Mention for the John Schlesinger First-Time Filmmaker Award, and numerous other festivals worldwide.
Following its impressive festival run, Barbara Forever arrives in U.S. theaters, opening on September 4, 2026 at the Film Forum in NYC.
Pioneering queer avant-garde filmmaker Barbara Hammer (1939–2019) broke barriers by centering frank lesbian sexuality and pleasure in an expansive body of beautiful, poetic, personal work. In Barbara Forever—constructed largely from Hammer’s own archive spanning five decades, alongside audio diaries and present-day conversations with her longtime partner, Florrie Burke—director Brydie O’Connor crafts a loving portrait of a force of nature while accompanying her through her final years and creative processes.
Writing for IndieWire, Sam Bodrojan praised the documentary as “a sincere ode to the queer iconoclast. For gay cinephiles, it’s a historic gold mine, worth sifting through basically no matter the documentary’s actual quality. What a lovely relief it is, then, that the O’Connor’s film is worthy of its subject matter, faultlessly curated and illuminating in the instrumentation of its material.”
Watch the official trailer for Barbara Forever above.
The following programs of short films by Barbara Hammer will screen during the film’s run at Film Forum in New York.
Barbara Hammer: Love Is Where You Find It includes Double Strength, Dyketactics, Superdyke, Sync Touch, Audience.
Barbara Hammer: Embodied Histories includes The History of the World According to a Lesbian, Sisters!, Snow Job: The Media Hysteria of AIDS, Still Point, Witness: Palestine, A Horse Is Not A Metaphor.
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