BARBARA FOREVER is an exclusive look at the iconic life, work, & legacy of pioneering lesbian experimental filmmaker, Barbara Hammer, tracing her prolific canon alongside never-before-seen documentations of her life and body, to reveal Hammer's unconventional attempts to live on forever.
SYNOPSIS
BARBARA FOREVER explores the films, archive, and ongoing cultural impact of experimental filmmaker Barbara Hammer, revealing her ingenious lifelong artistic effort to create and record lesbian histories, personal and societal. The film centers Barbara as a prism of the cultural ecosystems around her throughout her kaleidoscopic career – through the feminist and queer movements in 1970s San Francisco, the New York art world of the 1980s, the sex wars and rise of the radical New Queer Cinema genre of the 1990s, and Barbara’s reckoning with aging and mortality in the 2000s.
Driven by her canon of over eighty films, a vast archive of unreleased archival materials - hundreds of hours of footage, personal photographs, letters and drawings - and extensive audio interviews, BARBARA FOREVER tells Barbara Hammer’s story through her own images and words, making her the expert of her life, vision, and intentions.
Through the course of the film, Barbara shows us that the personal is not only political, the personal is historical. Looking to Barbara as one of the first filmmakers to put a lesbian life on screen that wasn’t there before, her work becomes a blueprint for a new generation of queer and radical artists to write our own histories into existence. This exploration of both Barbara Hammer’s life, work, archive, and her ongoing legacy provides an urgent, necessary story of queer life, feminist history and avant-garde cinema.
Director Statement
BARBARA FOREVER is the direct next step in my dedication to preserving queer history, Barbara Hammer’s legacy, and in my career as a documentarian overall. As my feature-length directorial debut, this is the perfect project. Not only because I have already spent over 8 years of my life immersed in Barbara’s art & archive, but because I now have the opportunity to creatively meld all of these materials into a portrait of a pioneer that challenges the structure of traditional biographical documentaries. Overall, I make a film that feels both true to Barbara Hammer’s ethos of radical art-making, playfulness, and experimentation, and my own vision and voice as a filmmaker. I view my own practice as a part of Barbara Hammer's legacy.
In 2025, Barbara Hammer is an incredibly influential figure in queer cinema and experimental filmmaking communities in NYC and around the globe. With this film, I am to contextualize Barbara Hammer’s legacy in these modern spaces, and think forwardly about how her impact guides us, as lesbians, women, and artists of today.
My background in film includes producing and archival producing/researching for documentary features and series, in addition to directing short documentary films and creating my own generative work. Beyond my own work, I have built a powerhouse team around this project, with extensive experience in experimental and queer filmmaking.
Thank you so much for your support.
ABOUT FILMMAKER(S)
Brydie O'Connor
Brydie O’Connor (she/her) is a Kansas-born, New York based filmmaker. Her work activates archives through queering storytelling structures within the nonfiction space. Brydie’s work has been supported by Hot Docs, Frameline, Dok.Leipzig, Ji.hlava IDFF, NYFA, NYSCA, Brooklyn Arts Council, DocsBarcelona, The Future of Film Is Female, ArtsKC, and the Stonewall Foundation, and has been presented at The Museum of Modern Art, BFI, & DOC NYC, among other festivals and galleries worldwide.
Most recently, Brydie was selected as the recipient of the Hulu/Kartemquin Accelerator, and she was an inaugural fellow in the UFO (Untitled Filmmaker Organization) Short Film Lab (2023-2024). She is a graduate of The George Washington University, and has developed her work at the Provincetown Film Society LGBTQ+ Filmmakers Residency (2024) and the On:View Residency (2024) in Savannah, GA.
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Women Make Movies (WMM), Inc. is a 501(c)(3) non-profit media arts organization registered with the New York Charities Bureau of New York State and accepts charitable donations on behalf of this project. Your donation will be spent by the filmmaker(s) toward the production and completion of this media project. No services or goods are provided by Women Make Movies, the filmmaker(s) or anyone else associated with this project in exchange for your charitable donation.
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