UTSA Honors College hosts festival featuring the films of Thomas Allen Harris
UTSA Honors College hosts film festival April 7-9 at Santikos Bijou Cinema Bistro
UTSA Honors College hosts film festival April 7-9 at Santikos Bijou Cinema Bistro
Share this Story(April 1, 2015) -- The UTSA Honors College will host a film festival “Through a Lens Darkly: Identity/Culture/Media in the Films of Thomas Allen Harris,” at 7 p.m., April 7-9 at the Santikos Bijou Cinema Bistro, 4522 Fredericksburg Road. Free and open to the public, all three showings will be followed by a discussion with the filmmaker Thomas Allen Harris.
Raised in the Bronx and Dar-Es-Salaam, Tanzania, Harris is a graduate of Harvard, an award-winning filmmaker and cultural warrior, whose documentary films, installations and experimental videos have been featured internationally on television and at festivals and museums. His films use a unique blend of intimate interviews, historical film, and home photography, stills and movies to weave memoiristic reflections on identity, sexuality and personal transformation in the African American community. Harris produced for WNET, the New York City public television station for more than six years and received two Emmy nominations for his work as a staff producer on the public affairs shows “The Eleventh Hour” and “Thirteen Live.” His documentary programs “CRISIS: Who Will Do Science?” and “CRISIS: Urban Education” aired nationally on public television in 1989 and 1990.
On Tuesday, April 7, the inaugural Honors College Film Festival will feature “Vintage-Families of Value,” a documentary intimately exploring three African-American families through the eyes of lesbian and gay siblings in the same family. This lyrical and impressionistic film blends intimate and sometimes painful conversations between family members, with dramatic re-creations, verite footage, performance, audio visual collage, archival photos and films. It sketches a provocative tableau of three modern black families negotiating sexuality and identity.
On Wednesday, April 8, the festival will feature “The Twelve Disciples of Nelson Mandela,” 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 festival wraps up on Thursday, April 9 with a showing of “Through a Lens Darkly.” The documentary 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. This film just was awarded an 2015 NAACP Image Award.
“It’s a great honor and delight to present Thomas’ unique documentaries to the UTSA and greater San Antonio public,” says Professor John Phillip Santos of the UTSA Honors College. Santos and Harris worked together as producers at WNET in New York in the early ‘90s. “Thomas’ work challenges all of us to use media in profound and creative new ways to understand ourselves and the world we live in. They illuminate deep, novel understandings of African American and LGBT identities, telling a new story about these experiences that we can all learn from.”
For more information, call 210-458-4106 or visit the UTSA Honors College.
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