Barbara Forever

Barbara Forever (2026) is directed by Australian filmmaker Brydie O'Connor in her feature debut. Drawing on the vast archive of personal footage and materials left behind by Barbara Hammer, the film traces the creative life and biography of this pioneering American lesbian experimental filmmaker. Barbara passed away in 2019, having made over 80 films across her lifetime. She is widely regarded as one of the founding figures of lesbian cinema. Barbara Forever premiered at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival and went on to win the Berlinale’s queer film honor, the Teddy Award, for Best Documentary/Essay Film.

The film is built from the director's selection and assembling of Barbara's enormous archive of personal recordings and works. The sheer volume of material is staggering, and it does not follow any fixed chronological or logical order, yet at no point does the film feel excessive or disorganised. In fact, the editing precisely captures Barbara's own restless energy. Life does unfold in a straight line, but the way people experience it, make sense of it and interpret themselves within it is always layered and recursive. In real life, the connections between events are often like threads of spider silk: nearly invisible, yet strong enough to hold the fragments of a life together across time. The film's structure embodies this, refusing the conventional biographical impulse to move from birth to death, and the editing rhythm carries that refusal through, creating a sense of accumulation rather than chronology. The score works in a similar way, arriving at just the right moments to draw out and extend an emotion that the images have already begun to convey.

When watching Barbara's footage, it sometimes feels as if a certain attitude is being passed directly across time. Her prolific output was not just about quantity; she saw the process of creation as a form of resistance against a film industry dominated by white men. It is not just her persistence that strikes me, but also her insistence on occupying space. In order to be heard, women first have to be seen, and creating work is an act of taking up that space. One of Barbara's early significant works involved filming herself on dates with each of her partners at the time. Not only is the subject matter radical and defiant for the time, but everyone on screen also appears uninhibited and willing to show their intimate lives and desires without shame or self-consciousness. In a cultural context where female, especially lesbians’ desire had long been suppressed or appropriated by others, this was a declaration in itself. Barbara came out when she was already married and in her mid-thirties. Exploring one's own identity is an ongoing process, and it's never too late. I find myself wanting to hold onto that.

This sense of living life on one's own terms and claiming authorship over one's own life takes on another form elsewhere in Barbara's work. For queer people, pleasure itself is a form of resistance. While Barbara's films certainly include serious, historically minded work, others document a more fundamental way of being in the world: living as if the mainstream were beside the point, without positioning oneself against it. Barbara filmed herself leaving her marriage after coming out, riding a motorbike with a Super-8 camera. These images remind me of Thelma and Louise: women who leave behind the lives assigned to them, and in doing so, find that resistance to a patriarchal order does not have to be the starting point, but can grow naturally from the act of living for oneself. When we stop taking the mainstream's structures of oppression as our primary reference point and stop organising our lives around them, they lose much of their power to discipline us. Barbara's works also open up an imaginative space for other queer people of what life can look like, and demonstrates to mainstream society that queer life need not be defined by suffering, oppression, or resistance to what constrains it. It can be expansive, free, and deeply one's own. We can, and do, find real pleasure in who we are.

This subjectivity is made viscerally visible in Dyketactics, another of Barbara's landmark work from the 1970s, also contains many sequences that depict female bodies and desire directly. These are unmistakably different from images of lesbian sexuality produced to satisfy male desire. This distinction is not merely one of content, but also of structural position: when lesbians, or women more broadly, actively choose to film and present their own bodies, they are expressing subjectivity and desire that originate from within, rather than being assigned from outside. Barbara's images produce a counter-gaze that not only reverses the direction of looking, but also redefines both who has the authority to represent, and the terms on which bodies and desires are made visible. At the same time, I hold some critical distance when it comes to how this practice has extended over time. In recent years, when bodily display as a political gesture gets widely replicated and eventually codified within queer culture, something shifts - the body risks becoming a legible sign, a consumable marker of queerness that can be recognised, packaged, and circulated within and beyond queer communities. In this process, queer identity risks being narrowed down to a kind of bodily performance, as though visible, physical expression were the proof of queerness itself, and those whose queerness does not manifest in these terms become invisible or are quietly excluded. This rigidity would sit at odds with the radical intention behind Barbara's original work. That said, this is not a reason to dismiss the body as a channel of expression. At a time when queer movements were still in their early stages, using the body as an expressive medium was the most immediate and powerful medium available. Moreover, our expression always begins from embodied experience, and whatever our conscious political intentions may be, it inevitably carries a political dimension. That is precisely why individual experience is worth recording and why it finds resonance with others.

Barbara also explored the desires of older lesbians, which is both rare and valuable. This is particularly significant given that the lives and desires of older queer people remain seriously under-explored even today. I would like to mention two works here that have moved me in a similar way: Everyday Erotics: Older Chinese Women and Same-Sex Desire by Denise Tse-Shang Tang, which focuses on the personal experiences of older lesbians in Hong Kong; and the 2024 Hong Kong film All Shall Be Well, directed by Ray Yeung, which follows a woman as she navigates the aftermath of her partner's death. I will write about both works separately.

I have always felt that the death of a partner in an intimate relationship is something that the other person is left with that is almost unbearably cruel. In Florrie's recollections, her deep love for Barbara and her care for everything Barbara had fought for and built came through most strongly. She understood how important it all was to Barbara, so she kept everything safe, including the memories they shared. By continuing to tell Barbara's story, she stays connected to the person she loved. But, as an outside observer, I felt the grief more than her quiet recollections seemed to. Perhaps because Florrie remembers so much in such detail, the weight of loss feels all the more present. The more complete the memory, the heavier it can be.

Throughout the film, I kept wondering how it would end, and by the time it did, I had already shed a lot of tears. Barbara was such a vivid, vibrant person. After being diagnosed with cancer, she actively organised her own dying, continuing to contribute to the lesbian movement until her final days.

The film ends with a series of clips of Barbara reaching forward to turn off her camera after each recording session - the most touching part for me - even if her death could not be prevented, only Barbara herself could choose to turn off her camera.