E Minha Cara/That's My Face By Amira J. Jarmakani Amira Jarmakani is a student in the Graduate Institute of Liberal Arts at Emory University. She studies Arab American and Arab Women's literature and is currently working on representations of Arab women in US popular culture.

If you're into what the kids these days are calling "identity politics," this is a film for you.

Director and writer Thomas Allen Harris wants to take viewers on a journey toward himself. If the pretension of the premise hasn't lost you yet, then you have the patience to sit through Harris' overly self-conscious narrative voiceover in order to enjoy the complex interweaving of images and voices which blend crisply and beautifully to tell a brilliant story.

While the film opens with a seemingly narrow scope, the subjective narrative soon bursts open to include a combination of cross-generational stories about spiritual realization complicated and enhanced by hard questions about cultural identity. Harris gestures not toward benign unity but rather toward the rupture that can open up new possibilities. He insists that spirituality and cultural identity are inseparable and that both are enhanced by stubborn contradiction.

This film will certainly leave you with more questions than answers, which is a good thing.

                                                                 © FILM JOURNAL 2002