"Her Work Expanded What Lesbian Representation Could Look Like on Screen”: Brydie O’Connor on her Sundance-debuting Barbara Forever

"It’s been my own life that I’ve put on the screen,” pioneering artist Barbara Hammer says in VO as we witness her striking poses, flexing muscles, and standing defiantly naked before her lens. “My life has been lived in film.” Indeed, the taboo-shattering lesbian/avant-garde filmmaker, who died of ovarian cancer at the age of 79 in 2019, left behind an archive comprised of 80 films, along with a treasure trove of unreleased footage, audio interviews, personal photos and more. It’s an extraordinary body of work, put to skilled cinematic use by Brydie O’Connor — who likewise collaborated with Hammer’s widow Florrie Burke for her acclaimed 2022 short Love, Barbara — in her Sundance-debuting feature Barbara Forever. Fusing Hammer’s poetic words and striking images with her own experimental editing approach, O’Connor takes us on a riveting ride through one woman’s boldly adventurous life and the larger frame of queer history, from the lesbian and gay rights movement of the ’70s through to today’s more inclusive and expanded awakening. Ultimately, Barbara Forever is a heartfelt portrait of an individual who wasn’t afraid to embrace life on her own terms, holding lessons for humans of every profession and persuasion. A few days before the film’s January 24th Park City premiere, Filmmaker caught up with O’Connor, an award-winning artist in her own right whose “work activates archives through queering storytelling structures within the nonfiction space.”

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.