Barbara Hammer may have died in 2019, but to those who appreciate her work, the pioneering lesbian filmmaker still feels very much alive — and perhaps nowhere more vividly than in “Barbara Forever.”  A documentary entry in the 2026 Sundance Film Festival, the movie tells the story of Hamm er’s life as a mid-bloomer lesbian artist, drawing on a deep well of archival footage and ephemera Hammer created during her career of over 50 years making films. Her large body of avant-garde and experimental work focuses on women, women’s bodies and women loving women. Often her films revolved around her lovers and sexual partners, of whom the charismatic artist evidently had many. Born in 1939, Hammer realized she was a lesbian in her late 20s, left her husband and seemingly never looked back, from then on dedicating herself to creating boundless art that evinced an unflinching love for herself and other women.  For “Barbara Forever” director Brydie O’Connor, the film is a culmination of her career to this point, years spent working as an archival producer and simultaneously immersed in Hammer’s work.  “I have been in Barbara’s world for almost the last decade,” O’Connor said. “I researched her early filmography and (work) from the ’70s for my thesis in undergraduate. And I really was interested at that time in thinking about lesbian films that were made by lesbians.” The Kansas-born filmmaker wound up moving to New York, where she met Hammer around 2017, just after Hammer sold her archive to the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University. O’Connor continued researching Hammer’s work through the old, never-before-seen material, which comprised unused footage from Hammer’s films and even her daily life. When Hammer died in 2019 from endometrioid ovarian cancer, O’Connor reached out to Hammer’s widow, Florrie Burke, to send condolences and say she had been going through the archive and had found many sweet photos of the two together.  “I was very curious because Florrie didn’t appear in any of Barbara’s films. And Barbara centered so many of her films around her lovers and her experiences with them,” she said. The two connected, and O’Connor made a short film on Hammer’s legacy through the lens of her and Burke’s 31-year relationship, with Burke narrating, called “Love, Barbara.”  During that process, O’Connor kept finding more, including no shortage of recordings of Hammer talking about her work, her life and her inspirations.  “There was so much material that couldn’t possibly fit into the short documentary,” O’Connor said. “And I really felt like Barbara telling her own story with her own images would be incredibly powerful.” O’Connor started working on the feature-length film on the heels of the short in 2022, which she said was an emotional experience, even as someone trained to trawl archives.  “I surprised myself a little bit that I started so quickly after the short was finished,” she said. “I think I was just very excited. …  Barbara is so electric. So just listening to her felt so special and so intimate. So that was a very emotional part of it. … I spent, I don’t know, weeks just listening to her voice.” As well as using her previous experiences as an archival producer processing high volumes of old material, O’Connor learned to follow her own emotional response to Hammer’s footage as a method of organizing what to use in the film, filing the can’t-look-away, lightning-in-a-bottle moments in a “magic bucket,” as O’Connor called it.  One such moment is of Hammer and Burke lying in bed together during a New Year’s Eve in the ’90s to talk resolutions, which was something they tended to do each year. In pajamas, the two lie face to face, looking each other in the eyes as they talk about how much they mean to each other.  “It’s really just the most romantic thing I’ve ever seen in my life,” O’Connor said. “One that didn’t make the film: They were talking to each other through puppets to talk about their New Year’s resolutions … Just that we have that as a look into a long-lasting lesbian love and relationship, and that that’s real … It’s so nice to see Barbara and Florrie in their 50s (and that) the romance is so alive and well.” The transcendent nature of lesbianism is, after all, what so much of Hammer’s works are about. “Barbara Forever” makes space for bits of many of these seminal lesbian short films that center on this, such as 1974’s “Dyketactics,” an early film of Hammer’s lesbian oeuvre that shows women frolicking together naked in fields, streams, dirt, across the boundaries of where society is supposed to take place. The footage of their bodies multiplies and overlays as they touch each other without reservation. Hammer, speaking about the film in archival recordings, said that the essence of the shots in “Dyketactics” all purposely have the sense of touch in them.  “Touching another woman’s body, it changed my life,” Hammer said. “It had to be shot.”  That was during her “dyke adolescence,” as Hammer put it, a roughly year-and-a-half time period in which she made 13 films, many centered on her relationships, which seemed to fuel Hammer’s unending ability to channel her curiosity about the world into art that prioritized a sense of continuous self-reinvention.  For O’Connor, the process of putting the film together meant being in touch with that sense of self-renewal.  “Barbara’s version of being a lesbian was being very responsive to the world and then reflecting that in her work,” O’Connor said. “I think that the thing that became the clearest to me in this process is that queerness and being a lesbian is this thing about me that … provides a framework for me personally to stay curious about myself and to stay curious about the world and my place in the world.”  O’Connor said the way Hammer filmed even the most quotidian parts of her life was inspiring, too.  “She saw value in her life and what she was recording, and she saw value in saving it,” O’Connor said. “And then later in her life, she saw value in putting it places that made it accessible to people.” “Barbara Forever” is O’Connor’s attempt to help make Hammer’s large body of work even more accessible, she said.  “Film certainly degrades, so this idea of contextualizing it, or having space for this footage and this material that can be accessed, is really important to me,” she said. “Even though Barbara is gone physically … we’re living in her future.” ‘Barbara Forever’ in-person screenings 5:45 p.m., Jan. 24, The Ray Theatre 6 p.m., Jan. 25, Megaplex Redstone 4 8:50 p.m., Jan. 28, Megaplex Redstone 3  8:45 p.m., Jan. 30, Library Center Theatre 11:15 a.m., Jan. 31, Broadway Centre Cinemas Online 8 a.m., Jan. 29-11:55 p.m., Feb. 1 The post Barbara Hammer lives on in ‘Barbara Forever’ appeared first on Park Record. ...read more read less