From Africa to Brazil: documentary filmmaker Thomas Allen Harris goes in search of his Pan-African roots in That's My Face (E Minha Cara). (television).

For artist and filmmaker Thomas Allen Harris, the journey of self-discovery he embarks upon in his documentary film That's My Face (E Minha Cara), which premieres on the Sundance Channel on June 9, is as much steeped in his sexuality as it is in spirituality and identity. Except that he chose not to draw attention to the former.

"I asked myself, Should I make an announcement in the film that I'm gay?" recalls Harris. "Or should I just show myself just being in the film, surrounded by intimate friends and beautiful men and not explain myself?. I decided on the latter. The sexual journey is part of the whole fabric."

The multidimensional voyage in the film, which Harris describes as not so much a documentary as a "mythobiography," sees the African-American filmmaker journey to the city of Salvador da Bahia, the African center of Brazil, to discover more about the African deities, or orishas, who haunt his dreams. He first heard about the orishas when he lived as a child for two years in Tanzania, where the African-centered religion of Candomble is practiced. That religion, carried intact by African slaves to the New World and still widely practiced in Brazil, coexisted with Catholicism in Harris's psyche as he grew up.

Shot on silent Super 8 film (with music and a voice-over track subsequently added), That's My Face unfurls in a dreamlike patchwork of images that help to explore Harris's own desire to reclaim the culture of Africa. "The orishas are bisexual," he explains, "so Candomble combines sensuality with religious expression. As black queer people, we are looking for ways to have a spiritual practice that reflects our particular history and modes of expression."

In Salvador da Bahia, Harris met and became close friends with another gay man, Jorge, and the film also covers their platonic relationship. "It was a very sensual relationship with a male friend," Harris says. "It had the purity and innocence of a boyhood crush, and I felt closer to him than if it was someone I was sleeping with."

Harris started to work on That's My Face in 1995 after the success of his first feature documentary, Vintage--Families of Value, which explored African-American families through the eyes of their gay and lesbian siblings. Harris says the idea for the film developed from personal experience, since he and his brother (photographer Lyle Ashton Harris) are gay.

"It was an honest film about family, which happened to be told from the perspective of queer people," says Harris. "Some people in the black community were not ready for Vintage at that time--they couldn't understand how a film told from a queer perspective could reach a level of honesty about families which they hadn't seen before. Most films from then tended to talk about racism exclusively, not about different families talking among themselves."

Harris feels that representation of gay men in film and television has dramatically increased since then, although that representation is still skewed toward white men and to stories that revolve around coming out. "When do we get just to be, and be sensual, in our narration?" he asks. "Gay people can take a lead in opening up the dialogue around sexuality."

And that's what Harris will attempt in his next film, a "narrative sex comedy-thriller" called On the D.L., which he is currently writing with his That's My Face writing partner, Don Perry. "I can't really give away what it's about, other than it busts open this notion of gay versus straight. It's a pansexual smorgasbord."

Goodridge is U.S. editor of Screen International.