Berlinale 2026: Barbara Forever (dir. Brydie O’Connor) | Review
Brydie O’Connor’s Barbara Forever is an affectionate and elegantly edited tribute to queer cinema pioneer Barbara Hammer, yet stops short of fully engaging with the breadth and urgency of her global political commitments.
Barbara Forever is a gentle, affectionate documentary which reflects on the life, work and influence of queer cinema pioneer Barbara Hammer. Directed by the debut filmmaker and Hammer scholar Brydie O’Connor, the film received its premiere at Sundance and its international premiere in the Forum Special section of the 76th Berlinale.
The editing carefully weaves together Hammer’s films into a montage that honours both her experimental style and playful on-screen presence. The decision to follow the documentary in Berlin with a showing of one of Hammer’s own films was a particularly sweet touch.
It’s a tender movie, and an elegantly edited one, but I found myself wanting a little more from the politics of it all. Perhaps this expectation comes from having seen other retrospective documentaries at Berlinale that weave emotionality, creativity and politics together with immense results — such as the 2024 doc I’m Not Everything I Want to Be. By contrast, Barbara Forever remained a little soft around the edges, even when dealing with an artist whose life and work were anything but.
Hammer was profoundly political and although Barbara Forever foregrounds the artist’s lesbian identity and feminism — undeniably central — it doesn’t go further. We are left missing any reference to Hammer’s wider leftist and internationalist engagement: her travels to South Africa, her films about Palestine, her solidarity work beyond the US queer art scene. These omissions feel particularly striking given how central global justice and anti-colonial solidarity were to her later life and given the intensity of the current political discourse around these issues.
At the premiere, the filmmakers did acknowledge Hammer’s 2021 movie Witness: Palestine and encouraged audiences to seek it out, which was a welcome gesture — but also managed to underscore the absence of this film within their own documentary. When an artist’s political commitments are so integral to their worldview, their lack of inclusion is an odd choice.
That said, the film is undeniably a well made love letter to Hammer, capturing her humour, sensuality, and radical tenderness — her insistence that the body, aging, illness, and queer love are sites of vulnerability, politics and power.
I’m grateful to O’Connor for shining a light on this pioneering filmmaker. Perhaps the most fitting tribute to Barbara Hammer is not this film alone, but the invitation it extends to keep watching and exploring her work, and to seek out the fuller, more politically expansive legacy she left behind.
Our team is on the ground at the 76th Berlin International Film Festival, running from February 12th to 22nd, 2026.
