In the last six months, I have had the privilege to meet with some of Philadelphia’s most talented and passionate filmmakers and artists as a cinéSPEAK Journal Fellow. I spotlight a Philadelphia-based artist and/or filmmaker working in the film industry each month. They talk about their creative practice and how the communities they’re a part of have fed and held them.
While unsure of my future in this city, I am sure of the immense talent and creative rigor coming out of Philly, which is evident in the works of these dynamic individuals. As I continue my journey here, I hope my excitement and respect for these artists’ work shines through. I look forward to seeing how their work will be celebrated and uplifted in Philly and beyond.
Here are some nuggets of wisdom from some of my favorite Philadelphia artists that have stuck with me.
Lunise Cerin: Lunise Cerin is a Haitian-American filmmaker. Born in Philadelphia and raised between both Haiti and the US. Most of her work resides on the imaginary border between the US and the Caribbean. She loves to tell stories of black people’s pursuit of self expression, liberation and love.1
Philadelphia is home to many thriving immigrant communities. It is also a city that honors and celebrates the spirit of Pan-Africanism to its core. I find that Philly, more than many other US cities, is a place that encourages folks to raise flags and share our traditions with pride. We aren’t a city that asks for Blackness to be just one thing. As an immigrant artist in Philadelphia, I am in community with several other immigrant artists who are also making pieces about their heritage and culture. And I have many Black American friends who have a lot of love and curiosity about Haitian history and culture. What this has meant for me as an artist is that I’ve never been made to feel that the pieces I make about Haiti aren’t welcomed here or won’t have an audience. I’ve found that folks are generally really open and inviting. It’s a really rich and beautiful thing to live in a place that champions that kind of diversity and allows for this type of expression, and I will always love Philly for that.
Tshay: Tshay creates intimate portraits of her loved ones to insist on the humanity of Black people. Through film and photography she creates openings for the full range of our humanity to be expressed: grief, fear, delight, and sensuality exist in delicate harmony. Her work calls upon a rigorous practice of writing, sketching, playing and conversing to ignite her capacity to regard life for what it is: a strange and stunning miracle.2
The filmmaking community in Philly makes me feel that it is not only possible but necessary, as a young Black person, to tell my story through the form of film. In Philly there is fellowship around cinema: I constantly attend screenings, talk-backs, gatherings, and events with local artists, media-makers, and film enthusiasts who see the power and potential of movie-making and video. This is a community of people who care about aesthetics, technical skill and craft, and who also understand the need to raise the consciousness of the people, to borrow Amiri Baraka’s language. The filmmaking community in Philly understands that movies can and should be employed to create a world where all of us are free from the harms of colonization and war-mongering. Being in Philly created a watering hole for me. And it ended up being the place where I made lifelong friends, collaborators, and chosen family.
Les Rivera: Leslie Rivera is a Puerto Rico-born writer/director driven by a passion for storytelling and entertainment. With a commitment to pushing artistic boundaries, Les has created captivating narratives in the form of short films, documentaries, and as the director of photography for the movie adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize-winning play, “Fat Ham.”3
I have more of a painter’s sensibility. I really enjoy being in that storage unit by myself, just having fun and throwing paint up on the canvas. I’m trying to figure out where I can meet the reality that filmmaking is a collaborative art form.
Mochi Robinson: The behind-the-scenes (BTS) photography of a film gives us a peek behind the veil of the filmmaking process. The fourth wall is broken and audiences are invited into the magic–the lights, the camera, the chemistry on the film set. As a photographer, Mochi Robinson’s BTS shots are artful, showing care and attention to small moments that reveal so much meaning.
I find that my work is usually rooted in people. Mostly how they interact with each other and the world around them. Doing a lot of event photography, I have had to learn and read people with anticipation of their actions, too. Which has only deepened my curiosity for capturing people even more. I also would love to think that I romanticize the mundane. I find immeasurable beauty and inspiration in the everyday actions we have. From an outdoor lunch break soaking up the sun, the gaze of someone in love, or even a child sitting upon their parent’s shoulders, there is extreme beauty in the actions we have every day.
Kayla Watkins: Film transforms how we see space and time. For Baltimore native and Trinidadian filmmaker Kayla Naomi Watkins, documentary filmmaking is a space of possibility and transformation. Since moving to Philadelphia over ten years ago, Watkins has been centering stories illuminating how systemic and social oppression impact Philadelphia residents' livelihood, mobility, and safety.
Autonomous visual representation is one of the key elements of achieving liberation in a world that revolves around media consumption. In my work, I am visualizing the feeling of being watched, consumed, and repackaged as a Black femme human for others to evaluate without consideration of our inner motivations.
My work seeks to go beyond the “tolerance” of my humanity into true intra- and inter-communal solidarity. I am filming a world which denies the self-determination of people through the use of propaganda and I seek to create alternative, accessible, community-centered counter-propaganda. The histories of Black and brown people are oral, visual, kinetic, veiled, and endangered–and I have chosen filmmaking, painting, and media education as my way to interrupt our erasure.
Tommy Butler: TOMMY BUTLER is an award winning director and writer of narrative films and ensemble generated projects. His films have screened at festivals across the country, including the Academy Award-Qualifying Palm Springs International ShortFest and New Hampshire Film Festival, Salute Your Shorts Film Festival, Philadelphia Film Festival, Julien Dubuque International Film Festival, Kevin Smith’s Smodcastle Film Festival, Charlotte Film Festival, and Blackbird Film Festival, among others.4
As a director and writer of narrative films, a critical throughline in all my work has been masculinity and male vulnerability as it collides with the contemporary American experience—[one] defined for me by class struggle and economic despair. This is my “point of entry” for The World Takes. My films, though fictional in nature, tend to start with a personal or autobiographical experience. Once I have the initial spark, I then build [the] story and characters around that experience so that I can establish a foundation to support an in-depth personal investigation. I find that distancing myself from my reality by inventing story and character offers me the opportunity to rewrite a personal history.
https://thefightforhaiti.com/team
https://www.tshay.co/about
https://wilmatheater.org/artist/leslie-rivera/
https://www.thomasclarkbutler.com/about