Thomas Allen Harris

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".

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Winner of a Golden Gate Award at the San Francisco Film Festival, "Vintage: Families of Value" is a thoughtful and sometimes painful examination of three black families through the eyes of gay and lesbian siblings including Harris and his brother Lyle Ashton Harris. The director confronts the issue by asking his mother to talk about her two sons being gay. This documentary weaves together stories from all three families with impressionistic scenes that express what some are unwilling to say.

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.

SPLASH is a fable-like tale of memory and emotion. Using a range of techniques, it deftly explores the interplay between identity, fantasy, gender, homosexual desire and pre-adolescence. These forces are but narrowly defined masculinity--particularly Black masculinity.

Black Body is a harsh and compelling meditation on the contradictory values assigned to black bodies in American culture: they exist as both desired and feared, abject and powerful. The “black body” is a body whose surface reflects projected fears and repressed desires; as such, it exists as a site of ideological struggle, a surface which is simultaneously eroticized and denegrated. With nightmarish narratives and loaded terms hovering over an image of a naked torso bound with wire, Harris shows how these contradictory values continue to cripple and contort the self-image of blacks. The video conveys a powerful sense of confusion and trauma, the problem of inhabiting a body that is a cultural taboo.