Thursday, November 7th at 7PM
Presented with Yale University's Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Alumni Association (Yale GALA)
Two Films by Thomas Allen Harris:
É MINHA CARA & HEAVEN, EARTH + HELL
Archival filmmaker Thomas Allen Harris charts familial and personal relationships to blackness, spirituality, and sexuality in the Bronx, Tanzania, and Brazil, offering a diasporic exploration of self in É MINHA CARA & HEAVEN, EARTH + HELL is an experimental narrative documentary that incorporates African, Christian and Native American cosmologies to tell a tale of love, loss and a search for freedom in two parallel inter-racial relationships. Together, the two films provide crucial and divergent approaches to magic, spirituality, identity, and sexuality. Curated by Nia Whitmal.
HEAVEN, EARTH + HELL
Thomas Allen Harris, 1993, 25 min.
Rich and inventive, HEAVEN, EARTH + HELL is an experimental narrative documentary that charts a course through African, Christian and Native American cosmologies to tell a tale of love, loss and a search for freedom in two parallel inter-racial relationships. Reflecting on the "trickster" figure in African and African-American culture, while recounting the story of his first love, Harris creates a graceful lament for the loss of innocence in a world without magic.
É MINHA CARA (That's My Face)
Thomas Allen Harris, 2001, 56 min.
A mythopoetic feast of self-discovery that crosses three continents and three generations, É MINHA CARA traces the filmmaker's journey to Salvador Da Bahia, the African heart and soul of Brazil, as he seeks the identity of the spirits who haunt his dreams. Paralleling the journey his mother made twenty years before to Tanzania in search of a mythic motherland, the film incorporates an innovative sound design that uses rap and hip hop strategies of multi-voice sampling. É MINHA CARA is the second installment of the Paulding Avenue Trilogy, which also includes Vintage and Twelve Disciples Of Nelson Mandela.
Post-screening discussion with Filmmaker + Professor Thomas Allen Harris, and Professor of African American and Africa Diaspora Studies and Anthropology Dr. Jafari S. Allen, moderated by Nia Whitmal!
After party, hosted by Yale GALA, to follow!
