USA,
1995, 72 min
Shown in 1996
CREDITS
- dir
-
Thomas Allen Harris
- prod
-
Thomas Allen Harris
- cam
-
Thomas Allen Harris, Miguel Díaz-Olmo, Chris Fish
- editor
-
Thomas Allen Harris, Chris Kuhrt
- source
-
Chimpanzee Productions
- gga award
-
Silver Spire, Film & Video: The Family
-
COMMENTS
Thomas Allen Harris in person.
OTHER
At times serious, often playful, Vintage: Families of Value takes an adroit stab at outdated, conservative notions of “family values.” Told through the eyes of lesbian and gay siblings, Vintage: Families of Value weaves home movies, video diaries, dance, performance, conversations and dream sequences into a compelling profile of three African American families. Thomas Allen Harris’s experimental, autobiographical work cleverly captures the always fierce, sometimes flirtatious, sometimes eccentric and often vulnerable qualities of its diverse cast of characters as much in its style as in its content. Vintage: Families of Value features three sisters, a sister and a brother and the filmmaker and his brother sharing childhood memories, confronting each other and talking candidly about family secrets, abuse, incest, sibling rivalry, gender constructs, coming out and coming to terms with each other’s identities. At the heart of the film is Harris’s own relationship to his brother, who is HIV positive. The filmmaker also shares poignant moments with his mother and estranged father. What emerges is a witty yet powerful portrait of contemporary American families.
—Nicole Atkinson
FACTOID #109
Though the film had won two major awards at the Berlin Film Festival, John Cassavetes’ Love Streams was pulled from the SFIFF program at the last minute by the distributor. According to Cassavetes, MGM/UA was concerned that showing Streams, which the director himself proclaimed ’a crazy film,’ at the SFIFF might hurt the film’s box office upon wider release
