Penn filmmaking class shares the stories of Philadelphia’s neighborhoods
Graduate and undergraduate students in Alissa Jordan’s course partnered with community organizations to create five short films that touch on education, archiving, and grassroots organizing in Germantown, Northeast Philadelphia, and West Philadelphia.
3 min. read
Student filmmakers Harper Prentice and Hosaena Tilahun interviewed Alisha Davis, a former history teacher who has served as the Free Library of Philadelphia’s Hyperlocal Heritage archivist since August 2025. As part of America 250, Davis has been surveying collections held at Parkway Central Library and identifying archival materials for digitization, use in programming, and preservation.
On the first Saturday in May, a projector screen beside the general fiction stacks at the Joseph E. Coleman Northwest Regional Library showed footage that Hosaena Tilahun, a first-year Africana studies Ph.D. student at Penn, shot two floors below just two-and-a-half months earlier.
Holding up photo albums, flyers, and newspaper clippings, Alisha Davis explained that amid America 250, the Free Library of Philadelphia wanted to bring attention to Philly’s neighborhoods. Davis is the archivist for Hyperlocal Heritage, a series of programs at five Philly libraries—Joseph E. Coleman, Bustleton, Cobbs Creek, Kingsessing, and Wynnefield—that collect local stories and amplifies community members’ voices.
In addition to Davis, Tilahun’s 15-minute documentary, “Gather(in) Memory: Archiving Hyperlocal History in Germantown,” features librarians Andrea Lemoins and Molly Ward, as well as library workshops on digital archiving, scrapbooking, and genealogy. The film shows how the hyperlocal newsroom Germantown Info Hub documented community archiving efforts and brought together neighbors through “memory circles.” It also highlights this year’s Dinah Day, commemorating the 250th anniversary of a local enslaved woman securing her freedom.
This was one of five short films that graduate and undergraduate students created for a community-engaged filmmaking course taught by Alissa Jordan, an adjunct assistant professor of anthropology and associate director of Penn’s Center for Experimental Ethnography.
The short film “One Frame at a Time,” about Sayre High School’s afterschool animation club, was one of five films screened at the Joseph E. Coleman library in May. In addition to documenting artmaking, it features high school students talking about the role of art in their lives—each holding up a paintbrush like a microphone—and program mentors.
(Image: Jack Nicholas Roney/LensBright)
People featured in the films were among the approximately 50 attendees at the May event, one of two community screenings of the final projects. The other films were:
“One Day You’re Five” tells the story of Queen Lane Montessori School through members of the Calzadilla family, who have run the Germantown early childhood education center since its opening in 1984.
“Towards” spotlights Natural Creativity, a Germantown-based, self-directed learning community that serves as a resource center for homeschooling families.
“One Frame at a Time” highlights the afterschool animation program at William L. Sayre High School in West Philadelphia, which Penn alumni Ejun Mary Hong and Jack Nicholas Roney expanded this past year through a President’s Engagement Prize.
“This City is Worth Fighting For” follows the efforts of the grassroots group 215 People’s Alliance in organizing around the environment, transit funding, immigrant rights, and education in Northeast Philadelphia.
Learning in and out of the classroom
Jordan says this class draws from an ethnographic filmmaking class that artist Sol Worth pioneered at the Annenberg School for Communication in the 1960s, in which graduate students were paired with community partners who played a key role in filmmaking.
Students took the year-long course in the fall, spring, or both. The fall focused on filmmaking principles and storyboarding for the five films, while filming and editing took place in the spring. The three-hour weekly classes in the spring operated as a creative production studio, with each individual or team screening footage every other week and receiving feedback from classmates.
As students sat on chairs, a beanbag, or the floor around Jordan’s office in the Penn Museum one day in February, Jordan posed a variety of questions. Does the buzzing of the overhead lights create a sense of place, or did students want to remove it in editing? Are students envisioning a structured film or a video collage? What are the benefits and drawbacks to having a team member edit footage they didn’t film?
Creating with the community
Through close collaborations with community partners, this course has taught students about building trust, navigating conflict, and working across differences, while challenging dominant filmmaking paradigms. Jordan challenges the idea that wide circulation is the marker of a film’s success, noting that films can act as archival documents for organizations—memories of a particular time and place. And students challenge extractive filmmaking practices by involving partners upfront in determining the vision for the film.
Germantown Info Hub journalist Rasheed Ajamu shares this goal: “My work also is to make sure we’re co-creating with the community and not just for the community,” they say. Ajamu also sees this class as an opportunity for Penn students to better understand Black Philadelphia and immerse themselves in a city they’re not from—a sentiment echoed by Tilahun, who moved from Washington, D.C., to Philly last year.
“I’ve always been drawn to film’s capacity to emotionally and visually arrest our attention, forcing us to reconsider our deeply held assumptions and beliefs,” Hosaena Tilahun says. She says that archival documents sparking programming at the Joseph E. Coleman library speak to “how our local libraries serve as hubs of both archival preservation and memory-making, especially when it comes to the stewarding of hyper-local history.”
Tilahun says the course showed her the potential of filmmaking for mutual teaching and learning.
“Every librarian, archivist, journalist, and community member I met while making this film demonstrated how history is built through active communal participation and partnership,” she says. “Each collaborator shared and taught me about their rooted memories of Germantown and broader Philadelphia. Film simply served as a means to capture these lessons and extend that shared learning experience to my audience.”
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