When Anne de Mare moved to Croton-on-Hudson in January 2023, she expected a bit more space and quiet. What she didn’t anticipate was that her home would become the crucible for what she calls “the gift of my life”: the esteemed new old documentary Once Upon a Time in Harlem.
That film, which de Mare produced and edited, has already garnered national attention, including coverage in The New York Times and The New Yorker and has won the distinguished 2026 Library of Congress Lavine/Ken Burns Prize for Film. New York Mag’s review is titled, “One of the Best Movies of 2026 Was Shot in 1972”.
The film was the lifelong passion project of pioneering filmmakers William and Louise Greaves, who both passed away before it could be finished. William’s son David Greaves (who had been one of the original cameramen in 1972) and granddaughter Liani Greaves then took up the reins, completing the film with de Mare.
“I cut most of the film in my home studio,” de Mare said. “David would take the Metro-North down from Troy, I’d pick him up at Croton station, and we’d work on the film in my little studio in the house.”
The footage for Once Upon a Time in Harlem was shot on 16mm film on August 6, 1972, when William Greaves arranged a reunion cocktail party at Duke Ellington’s house in Harlem and invited the surviving writers, musicians, and intellectuals who shaped early 20th century Black art and culture. Many of them hadn’t seen each other in decades.
“What the camera captured was really this generation that was at the center of this incredibly powerful cultural movement,” she said. “They were wrestling with their place in history. They talked about the role of the artist in the culture. There’s a lot of tension, but there’s also a lot of joy.”
Editing archival films can be challenging due to incomplete footage. This was the opposite.
“Nobody except film people will fully appreciate this,” laughed de Mare, “but the party is so well shot. There was nothing I needed that I didn’t have with at least two cameras. It was a dream to work with.”
The end result, after over 50 years in limbo, is a 100-minute film of a generation discussing their past while looking toward the future.
“It really is this exceptional gathering.” De Mare said, “David [Greaves] always says that Bill Greaves wanted to make this film for the future. He made it for us.”
De Mare’s involvement began in 2021, when she was introduced to Louise Greaves, Bill Greaves’ widow, and she was asked to write a grant to the Ford Foundation to help preserve the film.
“She came to my apartment with this footage of this amazing party,” de Mare recalled, “I fell in love with her, and the footage made my heart stop, it was just so extraordinary.”
With the Ford Foundation grant secured, film preservationist Bill Brand was hired to restore the original 16mm footage. But the team discovered a technical challenge: the audio had become separated from the film reels. Recovering the audio was crucial.
Tragedy struck when Louise Greaves died in March 2023, just as de Mare was settling into her new life in Croton.
“I was able to tell her before she passed that we had the audio and we were going to be able to finish the film,” de Mare said. “She made me promise on her deathbed that I would see the project through. I’ve never in my life made a deathbed promise before, but I did. It’s entirely because of her that this film exists.”
After Louise’s death, Greaves’ son David and granddaughter, Liani, took over William Greaves Productions. Their first project would be Once Upon a Time in Harlem; David would direct the film, and Liani and Anne would produce. With the preservation complete, Lynn True was hired to complete initial editing. However, the Ford Foundation funds ran out early in 2025 with the film far from finished.
“It was very difficult to raise money for this project,” de Mare said. “At the time it was incredibly frustrating. In retrospect, it turned out to be the best thing that could have happened.”
Without formal funding, de Mare and David had to cut the film on their own, which turned out to be a silver lining.
“David and I spent six months together alone in the edit room,” she recalled. “That’s where we really found the film. We had the time to sit with the footage and let the film find us.”
The turning point came during a series of screenings to spark interest among funders. Liani invited Richard Brody, a longtime film critic for The New Yorker. Although Brody initially insisted he couldn’t comment publicly until the film was finished, the rough cut changed his mind.
“At the end of watching that cut, he came up to us and said, ‘I want to write about it now. This has to happen. What do you need?’” de Mare said.
Brody’s subsequent article described Once Upon a Time in Harlem as one of the greatest films he had ever seen — and noted that it remained unfinished for lack of funding. Somewhere in Bar Harbor, Maine, a man named Will Thorndike read the piece, called The New Yorker, and asked to be put in touch.
“He called us up and said, ‘What do you need?’ And they wrote us a check,” de Mare said. “It’s the thing that never happens.”
That infusion of private funding finally allowed the team to complete the film.
De Mare says the film’s latter life has deep Hudson Valley roots. David Greaves lives in Troy; Liani lives in Valley Cottage, just across the river from Croton. Their work sessions in de Mare’s Croton home turned the project into what she calls a “Hudson Valley project.”
Croton itself, she says, has nourished the work in quieter ways.
“I didn’t know how great the town was,” she said. “I didn’t know how much nature there was, how many trails.”
For de Mare, Once Upon a Time in Harlem is a film urgently tuned to the present.
“We’re living in a time when these histories are being systemically erased,” she said. “These sort of irrefutable first-person narratives, in their own voices — we really need to listen to the ancestors here. We need to be reminded that they existed, that they paved the way.”
