Barbara Hammer once said, “If we’re experimenting with our lives and the way we’re going to live, our film and our art should also be experimental. It breaks tradition, and makes you think in a broader way. It’s the way I experience the world.”

I’ve been carrying that quote with me lately, especially as I think about how I came to independent and queer cinema as part of my film lover journey. Like many people, my deeper dive began during the pandemic, when time slowed and watching films felt less like consumption and more like communion. I wasn’t new to queer cinema—I had already found my way to Todd Haynes’ “Poison” and “Velvet Goldmine,” and to Céline Sciamma’s films, especially “Tomboy” and “Portrait of a Lady on Fire.” Working with the Reeling Film Festival at Chicago Filmmakers, particularly on the Sapphic Shorts program, widened my field of vision even more. And when the Criterion Channel streamed films like Cheryl Dunye’s “The Watermelon Woman” and Lizzie Borden’s “Working Girls” and Rose Troche’s “Go Fish,” something clicked. These early ’80s and ’90s films revealed a scrappy, intimate, radically personal landscape of queer independent filmmaking that felt both historical and urgently alive.

That exposure changed the way I looked at film—especially because so many of my friends are queer filmmakers themselves. Watching this work made me think about people I know, like Chicago-based filmmakers Emily Lape and Mary Tilden, who are each developing distinct voices rooted in honesty, experimentation, and lived experience. The throughline between past and present suddenly felt very clear.

And yet, for all of this, I was startled by a gap in my own knowledge when I encountered “Barbara Forever” at Sundance. Somehow, I had never truly engaged with the work of Barbara Hammer. As an experimental filmmaker, she belonged to a lineage I hadn’t explored deeply, even though I’ve long been drawn to films that push against narrative and formal convention. I’ve seen plenty of features that flirt with experimental structure or editing—”The Chronology of Water,” my favorite film of 2025, comes to mind—but Hammer’s work was something else entirely. It felt foundational, and encountering it so late felt like a personal oversight.

“Barbara Forever” became my entry point, and I’m grateful for that. Directed by Byrdie O’Connor, the film allows Hammer to tell her own story using only images from her expansive body of work. O’Connor has said, “I hope to contribute to the preservation and expansion of queer history—documenting lives both real and imagined. And as a lesbian, I find those can be the same thing.” That ethos is woven into every frame. Through Hammer’s own images, the film traces her lifelong exploration of the female body, her sexual relationships, her artistic evolution, and ultimately, her experience of dying from cancer.

There is something profoundly moving about hearing a life narrated by its own art. Working closely with Hammer’s partner, Florrie Burke, after Barbara’s death in 2019, O’Connor shaped the archive into something intimate rather than reverent—alive rather than sealed in amber. It makes sense that the film won the Jonathan Oppenheim Editing Award; the editing doesn’t just organize a life, it breathes with it.

Hammer’s legacy, though, extends far beyond her films. She was a committed teacher, a mentor, and a steward of queer history. In 2017, her paper archive was acquired by Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, and that same year she established the Barbara Hammer Lesbian Experimental Filmmaking Grant, ensuring that future generations of queer artists would have both resources and permission to take risks.

Watching “Barbara Forever,” I couldn’t help but think back to that quote—to the idea that experimenting with art is inseparable from experimenting with how we live. Discovering Hammer’s work didn’t just expand my understanding of queer cinema; it reframed it. It reminded me that tradition is something to converse with, not obey, and that personal vision—especially queer personal vision—has always been radical, necessary, and worth preserving.

Learn more about Barbara Hammer: https://barbarahammer.com/

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