In Barbara Forever, director Brydie O’Connor deftly assembles a compelling and comprehensive profile of pioneering lesbian filmmaker Barbara Hammer using a wealth of clips, photos, interviews and footage from Hammer’s personal archive. We posed our Qs à la mode to Brydie, and here’s what she shared!
If I had to describe my film using only three adjectives, they would be: Embodied, kaleidoscopic, fluid.
I wanted to make this film because: Barbara Hammer is such an inspiration — as an artist and a person, how she created and how she lived her life. For nearly six decades, she pushed her work forward on her own terms, remaining genuinely curious about the world and her place within it. I’m so drawn to how she approached both life and filmmaking with such openness, and it’s invigorating to experience a woman artist evolving over time, continuously reinventing herself throughout her life. Barbara’s films should be more accessible and more people should know about her prolific, influential canon of work to find their own points of connection. This is one of the core motivations behind Barbara Forever.
The thing that surprised me most while making my film was: Sometimes things line up unexpectedly in the edit and feel like little miracles — associations or connections that reveal themselves through the process of combining materials. I take that as a really good sign that my editor and I are on the right track — that the edit is evoking something new within the framework of our themes and guiding principles.
My favourite moment/scene/sequence in my film is: So many — this answer always changes. There’s a particularly poignant moment in a contemporary scene when Barbara’s partner, Florrie, talks about conversing with Barbara even after her death. In the archival, I really love the sequence where Barbara explodes into her “dyke adolescence,” dating a string of women. Our composer, Taul Katz, made a grungy rock track for the scene, weaving in the sounds of women breathing to make it feel visceral and charged. It’s awesome.
My most invaluable piece of doc-making equipment was/is: Hard drives! We worked through so many of Barbara’s own drives to find material, and there was something really valuable in seeing how she had organized her archive herself. Copying everything onto our own drives and re-organizing it allowed us to both preserve her logic and make sense of the material for the film.
My must-have snack to get me through hours in the editing room is: Coffee, haha. My go-to is espresso with oat milk.
One piece of documentary-filmmaking advice I’d like to share with aspiring documentarians is: Make your work! Try new things, and be empowered to take creative risks – you will learn through the process of doing. I’ve learned to both shoot and edit throughout the process of making Barbara Forever.
Want to check out Brydie’s film or just learn more about it?
Get the scoop, and your tickets, here!
