About the program
The film focuses on the extraordinary career of American architect Louis Kahn (1901–1974) and Nathaniel’s search to know his elusive father. Louis Kahn died in 1974 while the Yale Center for British Art—his last building—was under construction. Following the screening, Kahn and Thomas Allen Harris, acclaimed multidisciplinary artist and Yale professor in the practice in Film & Media Studies and African American Studies, will discuss conjuring family ghosts and how the movie camera acts as a mediator between the world of the present and the absent, the living and the dead. Harris and Kahn have made award-winning films involving family secrets that are narrated in the first-person.
About Nathaniel Kahn
Nathaniel Kahn, Yale BA 1985, is an American filmmaker. Kahn's Emmy- and Oscar-nominated documentary My Architect (2003; rereleased 2023), about his father Louis I. Kahn, won the Director's Guild of America Award and is in the permanent collection of The Museum of Modern Art. Kahn’s film Two Hands, about the late concert pianist Leon Fleisher, was also nominated for an Academy Award and an Emmy. His film The Price of Everything, about the contemporary art world, was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance and was broadcast by HBO, and his film The Hunt for Planet B was broadcast by CNN and won an Emmy Award in 2022. Most recently, Kahn directed the IMAX film Deep Sky about the stunning images of the universe beamed back to Earth by NASA's James Webb Space Telescope. The film, narrated by actress Michelle Williams, was released in more than three hundred IMAX theaters nationwide. Kahn is a voting member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and is a 2024–25 visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He is currently working on several documentaries as well as a fiction film.
About Thomas Allen Harris
Thomas Allen Harris is a Yale professor in the practice, Film & Media Studies and African American Studies. He is an interdisciplinary artist, filmmaker, and scholar whose work explores family, identity, and spirituality. Drawing on the canon of African American and African diaspora literature and arts, he pulls audiences into dialogues that transcend the barriers that separate people. His deeply personal films reinterpret the idea of documentary, autobiography, and personal archive. He is co-founder and co-director of Family Pictures Institute for Inclusive Storytelling, a nonprofit that builds on his previous transmedia project, Digital Diaspora Family Reunion (DDFR), and his PBS series, Family Pictures USA, by using participatory storytelling, artistic projects, and community engagements that activate the family archive to create a more inclusive and empathetic society. Harris is currently working on his upcoming documentary film, My Mom, The Scientist, and its national outreach campaign, Scientists in the Family, which is aimed at increasing engagement, curiosity, and belonging for multigenerational families historically underrepresented in STEM.
This program is made possible through the generosity of the Terry F. Green 1969 Fund for British Art and Culture.
Top image
© Louis Kahn Project, Inc.
