It’s a Monday afternoon in the middle of the summer. School is out and the “summer slide” is in full swing. But at Community Bike Works, a youth-centered non-profit in Allentown’s Promise Neighborhood, students from the Allentown School District are sitting around a table learning, collaborating, and speaking their stories into existence.
On October 26th, seven short films from emerging student filmmakers will be released to the public for the first time. The kick-off of the films’ community-wide tour will be held at Allentown’s new Arts Walk Pocket Park (the entrance is at 27 N. 7th St. and the park is located directly behind 2 City Center at 645 Hamilton Street), with a Saturday afternoon of artist-led workshops for youth from 4:30 pm to 6:30 pm, followed by a screening at 6:30 pm and a moderated panel with student directors immediately following the screening. The event will be free and open to the public. If it rains, the event will be moved to Muhlenberg’s Multicultural Center (2252 W Chew Street).
Students’ imaginative, genre-defying short films are produced by a new program, Collaborative Media Expressions (CME), that aims to engage, support, and cultivate youth voices through digital storytelling.
Grant funding to support the immersive ten-week filmmaking workshop at Community Bike Works was awarded by Upside Allentown and managed by The Cultural Coalition of Allentown. Their funding, combined with a generous $1,000 donation by local activist Daniel Poresky, invested $8,500 into a filmmaking program that is focused on shifting narratives in Allentown by centering and empowering young storytellers in the community.
The Classroom on North Madison Street
As Allentown students from across the city sit together at the table, their stories emerge and take shape. Non-fiction and fiction blend together as Nasheera (16) imagines what her poem about systemic racism looks like as a film. Her brother, Sharif (13), storyboards an experimental narrative about a friendship that is shared through a passion for bike riding. Avery (14) - who Sharif asks to act in his film - tries to take the language of one of his poems and turn it into something communicated solely through visuals. Christian (15) expresses concern about the recent spike in gun violence and drafts questions to ask local activists. Vannity (16) brings her notebook in from home with ideas sprawling across the page. Baraka (13) dreams about being the best soccer player in the world and maps out how that looks and feels on the screen. Erick (16) brings in ideas that seem endless and all possible, but his story really begins to take shape as a local climate protest approaches.
In this classroom on North Madison Street, students share their stories in imaginative, vulnerable, and collaborative ways, as their ideas are only possible if they trust each other and work together.
Shifting the Narrative(s)
“I didn’t think this was for us”. This observation emerges when the equipment arrives. The students, who have grown up fully immersed in the age of technology, adapt quickly to the complex new systems. But they still comment openly on the quality of the equipment and the ability of the technology to fully realize the stories they are imagining. The cameras, filters, cords, lights, and sound equipment pass from hand to hand as students explore their new tools.
This filmmaking equipment has historically been inaccessible in their city - a reality that everyone in the room feels as more stories about trust and access and experience fill the space.
CME was proposed to the Coalition’s Authentically Allentown Artist-in-Residence Program in response to this issue of access and trust with Black and Latinx students in the city of Allentown. It is an issue that is deeply rooted in the history of America, as well as the history of filmmaking, and one that actively shapes the narrative(s) of the city students call home. This also makes it an issue that must be actively and intentionally decolonized.
This collaboration - between Allentown, CME, Community Bike Works, and the Parris J Lane Memorial Foundation - is a small part of the many converging solutions rising up from the community to do this work and to reshape the narrative(s) of Allentown.
“Do Nothing Without Intention”
Lead educator, documentary filmmaker, cinematographer, and local basketball coach, Drew Swedberg, designed the program after three years of teaching film and media in after-school settings. Swedberg witnessed how film could be a powerful vehicle for self-expression, community engagement, and youth empowerment. Swedberg’s experience as a filmmaker and educator converged with the mission of Shalon Buskirk, who has consistently and actively advocated for youth in her city and has worked every day towards a space that allows young people to express themselves, communicate with each other, have access to critical resources, and build community. She has anchored this work in the memory of her son, Parris Jerome Lane. Swedberg knew the program would be partnered with Shalon’s emerging non-profit and the two are working together daily to make that space a reality.
With CME’s debut workshop, Swedberg hoped to take the after-school program a step further. He proposed a workshop that would invest in equipment that could match the aesthetic ambitions of his students, give his students enough time to create, compensate local artists for bringing their experiences into the classroom, and celebrate his students’ accomplishments through a series of community screenings.
The ten-week course he arrived at introduced students to an array of filmmaking techniques, innovative films, and local artists. The work is informed and forever indebted to the work of mediamakers, creatives, activists, and educators that came before him from Allied Media, Young Chicago Authors, PhillyCAM, HYPE, and Scribe Video Center; to bell hooks; to educators, peers, creative collaborators, and students in his life from Muhlenberg College, Lafayette College, Lehigh University, LVAIC Documentary Storymaking, and ASP’s Mass Media classroom; and most critically to the countless hours of instruction with Allentown School District students at Jefferson Elementary, McKinley Elementary, Trexler Middle, Casa Guadalupe, and students across the Valley that have participated in ArtsQuest’s programming.
A Classroom to Dream In
The workshop met twice a week for the first seven weeks. Students started by consuming and engaging with work from photography giants such as Roy DeCarava, Carrie Mae Weems, and Deana Lawson, as well as contemporary photographer Diego Huerta and emerging photographer Sade Ogunjimi. The focus stayed (throughout the entire program) on providing students with “toolbox skills” that cultivated their creative agency by allowing them to react and relate to a variety of styles, ideas, and creative expressions.
In the first week, Lehigh graduate student, photographer, music producer, and filmmaker, Donterrius Walker, kicked off the series of guest artists by bringing his photography into the classroom and allowing students to engage with both the work and the artist behind the work.
In the second week, Annie Diaz - who is currently the editor for Kristal Sotomayor’s Philadelphia-based documentary, “Expanding Sanctuary”, a film that follows the victory of Latinx activists at Juntos ending police communication with ICE via PARS - brought her intimate documentary film, “Para Ti”, into the class to talk about identity and cinematography.
As students transitioned from photography to film - engaging with RaMell Ross, Solange, Barry Jenkins, Adepero Oduye, Tania Hernández Verlasco, Garrett Bradley, Terence Nance, Vernon Jordan III, and Ashley Omoma - they started to pitch ideas and develop their own stories.
In the third week, accomplished local photographer, Charles Stonewall, helped students develop their understanding of light in an intensive and generous hands-on workshop that moved indoors and out, producing a series of remarkable portraits that students actively co-crafted.
As students finished up the planning of their stories and moved towards shooting scripts, the force that is the spoken-word poet, activist, and founder of Lehigh Valley Soul Sessions, Justice Davis, came in to help students embrace the power of their voices in an engaging workshop.
As the workshop transitioned into production, students took on different, rotating roles on each film. A single film had a director, a cinematographer, two assistant directors, a sound recordist, a gaffer, and an extended team of production assistants who all worked together to accomplish the director’s vision. Their teamwork was tested at times - as no collaborative creative work can occur without difference - but each time they collectively found a way to accomplish their goals for the day. In the words of Mariame Kaba, “nothing that we do that is worthwhile is done alone." And students found this to be absolutely true over the summer, as each director exhaled an exhaustive sigh of relief and accomplishment at the end of their respective production day.
As the school year kicked back in, students finished the process by editing in small teams at Community Bike Works, Muhlenberg College’s Multicultural Center, and the Baum School of Art. As these ambitious, imaginative, and powerful films arrive at their final cut, each student director will soon be able to see their work on the big screen and begin dreaming about what the next story might be.
To find out more information on upcoming screenings across the city and for all updates, you can visit @collaborativemediaexpressions or @communitybikeworks on Facebook or the CCA’s website at culturalcoalitionofallentown.org. Additional screening dates will be announced soon.
