-- Directed by Macky Alston, Produced by Selina Lewis -- Liberty Theatre, Saturday, May 2 One man's search for the truth about his ancestors' history as wealthy slave owners by researching both black and white holders of the family name of Alston was bound to strike a chord in Bermuda.

And an enthralled audience at the Liberty Theatre hung on every twist and turn as Macky Alston took a painstaking walk down the winding byways of his state's past -- a past that many would rather forget, even though traces of it seem to pop up around every corner.

Wallace MacPherson Alston III -- the gay seminary dropout son and grandson of churchmen and known as Macky -- begins his detective work at a family reunion of the white Alstons.

And they clearly take their family history very seriously with one stetson-wearing Alston producing a family tree stretching back through Holy Roman Emperor Charlemegne and Alfred the Great of England to Noah and Seth -- apparently the son of Adam and Eve.

But Macky's business with the family name is less ambitious -- he wants to link his branch to the black Alstons through master-slave interbreeding.

And the search takes him to a black Alston family reunion, held only 40 miles away from the white one, although neither party knows the other one is taking place.

Both black and white Alstons seem reluctant to dig too deeply into history and representatives of both sides claim there's no problem these days.

But the past rears its ugly head when a local newspaper details his plans, leading one resident to fire off a letter to the editor calling Macky a "warped, guilt-ridden shell of a man who must be a great disappointment to his father''.

And the paranoia about the past is underlined when he tries to film at the plantation home of "Chatham Jack'' Alston -- known as such because he apparently owned Chatham County and, more importantly, every black man, woman and child in it.

The current owners of the house turn him away because they fear that if it becomes known their home was the centre of an empire built on slavery "black people will burn it to the ground''.

And the closeness of history is stressed when it is revealed his grandmother -- and even his father, a man probably in his 60s -- reveal that they both remember a great-uncle who was one of the last slave-owners before emancipation.

But neither of them seem keen to say much about him -- except that he liked big plates of grits -- and Macky's slow unwrapping of the onion layers his grandmother has built up around her is a delight to watch.

And the scenes between the two have added poignancy when Macky admits his own family secret -- he's never told his granny he is gay.

He intercuts his own camera work with home movies seamlessly and it's sometimes hard to see where one ends and the other begins. Here, the relatively unsophisticated production style, which in other circumstances might be an irritant, only adds to the impact.

The detective work pays off when he gets a firm lead on Primus P. Alston, a prosperous black churchman who died in 1910. Macky finds the Rev. Alston was born a slave and was owned as a child by Chatham Jack's son.

The light skin of the Reverend and his children, one of whom still lives at the time of filming, points to the probability that from Nathaniel, Macky is indeed kin to black Alstons.

And he finds Fred, Jeff and Charlotte Alston, descendants of Primus, far from their southern roots.

Fred -- a refined and gentle classical musician -- and his son Jeff decide to visit the south after meeting Macky.

And Jeff -- brought up away from the ugly history of the plantation but with his own problems as a young urban black -- admits he was "kind of happy to meet these people'' after a concert by his father for black and white Alstons at an old plantation home turned into a music academy.

Other prejudices get an airing when Macky finds a black Alston living with the AIDS virus who resides a block away from him in New York.

The sting in the tale is that Macky's researches turn up the fact that he's not an Alston by blood after all because his great-great grandfather was illegitimate, but that hardly matters -- because the message that whether gay or straight, black, white or somewhere in between, we're all brothers and sisters under the skin comes across strong.

From a personal viewpoint, I would have liked to know where the Alstons, who arrived in North Carolina in the 1700s, came from.

North Carolina was heavily settled by Scots and the names Wallace and McPherson are undeniably Caledonian -- and one of the family's old plantations was called "Dalkeith'' -- my wife's home town in the Lothians.

Ironically, that part of the Lothians was a coal-mining area in the days when the mine-owners, in that case the Marquess of Lothian, owned not just the mines, but the people who worked in them as well.

Runaways from the coal face -- among them my wife's ancestors -- were made to wear an iron collar with the words "property of....'' stamped on them.

I wonder if any of the white Alstons know that their links to slavery might be even closer than they think.

RAYMOND HAINEY `Family Name' is being shown again tomorrow night at the Little Theatre at 9.15 p.m.

Is something a secret if everybody knows it, but nobody talks about it? FILM FESTIVAL MPC REVIEW REV