VINTAGE: Families of Value (1995)
FILM SCREENING & Discussion with Professors Thomas Allen Harris, Marta Figlerowicz and Roderick Ferguson
Sunday September 19th at 4PM
Theater 2 in Humanities Quad Lower Level
Thomas Allen Harris will be screening his groundbreaking film VINTAGE: Families of Value (1995)as part of his course “Family Narratives/Cultural Shifts” (AFAM 216/FLM 433). The project marks the beginning of Harris’ participatory and co-creative model of filmmaking and community storytelling that has recently culminated in his Ford Foundation-funded Family Pictures Institute for Inclusive Storytelling which will be housed at Yale.
VINTAGE: Families of Value is a refreshing experiment in community storytelling that serves as an up-close-and-personal celebration of queer Black intimacy. Three pairs of queer Black siblings – including Director Thomas Allen Harris and his brother, artist Lyle Ashton Harris – each document their families from separate angles. The result is a compassionate yet candid family video album, interwoven with tender and difficult conversations on parent-child relationships, gender identity and coping with HIV and the AIDS pandemic.
The film will be screened as a 16mm projection and is open to the Yale community.
Thomas Allen Harris is senior lecturer in African American Studies and Film and Media Studies, an award winning filmmaker, and president of the Family Pictures Institute for Inclusive Storytelling. This is the first in a series of screenings in conjunction with his course “Family Narratives/Cultural Shifts” (AFAM 216/FLM 433).
Marta Figlerowicz is associate professor of comparative literature and English at Yale University, where
she is also affiliated with Film and Media Studies. The author of two books, Flat Protagonists and Spaces of Feeling, she is at work on a project on the phenomenology of digital media.
Roderick Ferguson is professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and American Studies and is the author of Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique. He is currently working on two
monographs —The Arts of Black Studies and The Bookshop of Black Queer Diaspora.