THOMAS ALLEN HARRIS

Raised in New York City and Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania, Thomas Allen Harris is an award-winning filmmaker and “cultural warrior.” His documentary films, installations, and experimental videos have been featured in venues across the international landscape on television, at festivals, museums, and galleries. Reared by an African-American Chemistry professor mother and a South African ANC activist step-father, Harris has lived both in Africa and in the U.S., and much of his film work revolves around issues of identity and cultural awareness.

For over 6 years, Harris produced for public television, which included two Emmy nominations (in 1991) for his work as a staff producer at WNET (New York’s PBS affiliate) on The Eleventh Hour and Thirteen Live.

His feature documentary That’s My Face/E Minha Cara (2001) traces his personal journey reconciling his experiences as an African, an African-American, a gay man, a member of the world-wide African diaspora. It premiered at the Toronto, Sundance, Berlin, and Tribeca Film Festivals. It has also received more than eight international awards including the Jury Award for Artistic Excellence at the Atlanta Film Festival, the Prize of Ecumenical Jury of Christian Churches at the Berlin Film Festival and Best Documentary Award at OUTFEST the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Film Festival.

His most recent film, Twelve Disciples of Nelson Mandela, is an exploration into the life of his late step-father, Benjamin Pule Leinaeng, an early ANC activist who fled South Africa as a young man and established the ANC office in New York City. It too has appeared at many major international festivals and won the Best Documentary award at the Pan-African Film Festival.

In addition to his documentary film work, Harris has worked in a number of art forms, mixed media, and installations. A Harvard graduate, he taught for eight years as an Associate Professor of Media Arts at the University of California, San Diego. He is currently media courses as part of the Visual Arts Faculty at Sarah Lawrence College.

Harris has received numerous awards, grants and fellowships from such institutions as the Sundance Institute, the Ford Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, the Jerome Foundation, the Paul Robeson Fund, and the Lannan Foundation.

DOCUMENTARIES BY THOMAS ALLEN HARRIS

VINTAGE – FAMILIES OF VALUE (1995, 72 min.) is a fantasy documentary film which intimately explores three African-American families through the eyes of lesbian and gay male siblings -- two or more in the same family.

Awarded Best Documentary by the 1996 Atlanta International Film Festival and a Golden Gate Award by the 1996 San Francisco International Film Festival, this lyrical and impressionistic film, blends intimate and sometimes painful conversations between family members, with dramatic re-creations, verit* footage, performance, audio visual collage and archival photos and films to sketch a provocative tableau of three modern black families negotiating sexuality and identity.

E MINHA CARA/THAT’S MY FACE (2001, 56 min.)

A mythopoetic odyssey exploring identity and spirituality across three generations of an African-American family. USA, East Africa and Brazil.

Astoundingly beautiful and epic in scope, That's My Face (é minha cara) is a personal documentary offering an entire generation of African Americans a groundbreaking perspective on the maddening diasporic search for a mythic motherland. In healing his own cultural yearnings, director Thomas Allen Harris journeys beyond the political movements of his day and into a spiritual realm where he finds much more then he expects.

But his rebellious mother was part of the 1970s' movement that regarded Africa as home "because we knew America didn't want us" and migrated the family to Tanzania, East Africa. When they arrived in the modern city of Dar-es-Saalam, Africa seemed more like Miami than the motherland they imagined.

Thomas learned to love Africa for what it was, but when he returned to the Bronx, he was unable to express his newfound identity. Even his African Methodist-Episcopalian faith failed to provide him comfort until he learned from an Afro-Brazilian friend that beneath the patina of conventional Christian iconography is a rich double life of African ancestral spirit worship. Like his mother, Thomas embarks on a migration across the ocean, this time to Brazil, in an effort to find a sense of home and belonging.

That’s My Face has won top awards at a number of film festivals, including Toronto, Berlin, and the San Francisco Black Film Festival.

"Shot entirely on Super-8 film and employing an innovative sound design that uses rap and hip-hop multivoice sampling, That's My Face is as much an artistic gem as a spiritual gift."
- Shari Frilot, Programmer, 2002 Sundance Film Festival

"Mesmerizing documentary..."
- Ronnie Scheib, Variety

THE TWELVE DISCIPLES OF NELSON MANDELA (2005, 73 min.), film based on the story of the first wave of South African exiles who left Bloemfontein in 1960 to keep the anti-apartheid movement alive from East Africa, Europe, America and Cuba. In their heroic journey, this group of twelve -- and the thousands of young South African freedom fighters that would follow them - helped to create a global seismic shift that ultimately toppled the apartheid system in South Africa. One of the Disciples, Pule Benjamin Leinaeng, was the filmmaker's late father.

The Twelve Disciples won the Best Documentary award at the Pan-African Film Festival.

 "Harris pays tribute to Benjamin Pule Leinaeng, the stepfather who raised him, by traveling to South Africa and excavating the late Leinaeng¹s life as a political activist [in] the ANC and whose real-life exploits play like a James Bond film. Harris¹ trademark elegant visual style (owing much to both high-end fashion magazines and experimental film and photography) is put into the service of dramatic re-creations that flesh out documentary commentary from old friends and political allies, while family photos and home video become potent artifacts in the transformation of grief into celebration" - LA Weekly.

THROUGH A LENS DARKLY (in production). Through A Lens Darkly (whose previous working title was Reflections in Black) is a two-hour film that will explore 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 .

Through A Lens Darkly is inspired by Dr. Deborah Willis's ground breaking book Reflections in Black.

Source: Chimpanzee Productions—http://www.chimpanzeeproductions.org

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