Vintage: Families of Value

In 1996, the filmmaker journeyed to the city Salvador Da Bahia - the African heart and soul of Brazil - seeking the identity of the spirits who haunt his dreams. Twenty years before, his mother made a parallel journey when she migrated with the family to Tanzania, East Africa in search of a mythic motherland. Shot entirely on silent Super 8 film by three generations of an African American family, "That's My Face" creates a mythopoetic feast of self-discovery.

The film explores the role of photography, since its rudimentary beginnings in the 1840s, in shaping the identity, aspirations, and social emergence of African Americans from slavery to the present. The dramatic arch is developed as a visual narrative that flows through the past 160 years to reveal black photography as an instrument for social change, an African American point-of-view on American history, and a particularized aesthetic vision.

As the AIDS epidemic in New York escalated during the ‘80s, a young, out, black producer was fighting to get information about the crisis on screen. Thomas Allen Harris, raised by activists in the Bronx and East Africa, produced a series of public television programs focused on HIV/AIDS, bringing folks who were previously ignored by mainstream media to the core of public discussion. Despite the program’s success in breaking open the narrative of the crisis, the pushback Harris received from the channel’s executives and constraints of corporate media ultimately led the artist to suspend work in public television. 28 years later, Harris draws from these resurfaced tapes and an essay he’d written at the time: “About Face: The Evolution of a Black Producer". Commissioned by Visual AIDS in 2017 as part of ALTERNATE ENDINGS, RADICAL BEGINNINGS, a program of seven videos prioritizing Black narratives within the ongoing AIDS epidemic curated by Erin Christovale and Vivian Crockett.

Filmmaker Thomas Allen Harris focuses on the roles both his stepfather, Pule "Lee" Leinaeng, and the African National Congress played in bringing down apartheid from outside the confines of South Africa in this documentary that aims to strike a balance between intimate biography and searing social history. As the grip of apartheid was strengthening, a young group of concerned African National Congress activists exiled themselves to Botswana, Tanzania, and other "safe" locations outside of South Africa in hopes of battling oppression from the outside. By utilizing actors to create dramatic reenactments of events from that time, inter-cutting the newly shot footage with archival images, and tracing the path of his stepfather to the United States, Harris attempts to both personalize the plight of the ANC and simultaneously offer an in-depth account of the struggles the group faced while trying to abolish tyranny and restore justice to their homeland.

Massachusetts State Representative and Civil Rights Movement veteran Byron Rushing takes the campaign for same sex marriage in to the Black community, with the support of progressive Black clergy and activists. They face the hostility of the church and defining the right of same sex marriage as a civil rights issue on par with the campaigns of the 1960s.

Reflecting upon the figure of “Trickster” in African and Native American culture while recounting the story of his first love, Harris creates a graceful, deeply moving lament for the loss of innocence in a world without magic.

A diverse program of films and videos by various artists who challenge conventional representations of gender, family and sexuality, curated by Tom Kalin for Drift Distribution.