Barbara Hammer's "Nitrate Kisses" Returns in 4K at NYFF

A new 4K restoration of Barbara Hammer's first feature, Nitrate Kisses (1992), will premiere at this year's New York Film Festival this Saturday, October 3, and run through Wednesday, October 7.

The restoration is the latest in an ongoing effort to preserve the late feminist director's extensive body of work and archive. Hammer, who died in 2019, is also the subject of Brydie O'Connor's new documentary Barbara Forever (2026), which places the filmmaker at its center.

Hammer's films are not always easy to digest. Their syncopated cuts, layered edits, and general refusal of linear narratives demand active viewing. Yet her playful and persistent curiosity, along with her insistence on foregrounding what she witnessed and experienced of lesbian sexuality, life, and history, has secured her place in the cinematic record. She began making this work at a time when few other out lesbians were making films at all.

Nitrate Kisses is very much a film of its moment. In 1992, the AIDS pandemic was still in its early, devastating years, with LGBTQ+ communities reeling from catastrophic losses. The drugs that would dramatically improve life for many people with HIV remained a couple of years away from approval.

The film also emerged amid a United States culture war that feels troublingly familiar today. Undue stigma, vitriol, and violence were aimed at groups blamed both for the public health crisis and for the financial instability caused by widespread deregulation and the gutting of worker protections. As with contemporary culture wars, that fearmongering served double duty: it distracted from the root causes of inequity while enacting real harm.

The arts were a primary battleground. Right-wing fervor targeted works such as Andrés Serrano's "Piss Christ" (1987) and Robert Mapplethorpe's photographs depicting gay male sexuality. Artists and arts organizations accepting National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) funding faced pressure to sign "anti-obscenity oaths." The NEA Four — Karen Finley, Tim Miller, John Fleck, and Holly Hughes, whose grants were revoked under political pressure — became a defining controversy of the era.

It was into this hostile climate that Hammer released her rough-and-ready first feature, one that refused linear storytelling and claimed space for lesbian histories that mainstream culture sought to erase.

The New York Film Festival screenings arrive as Hammer's legacy receives renewed attention on multiple fronts. With O'Connor's Barbara Forever circulating this year and restoration efforts continuing across her archive, the 4K premiere positions Nitrate Kisses not as a period piece but as a work whose context — pandemic grief, manufactured moral panic, and artistic censorship — remains very much alive.