Forty-four Philadelphia-based films will be showcased at the Museum of Black Civilizations in Dakar, Senegal to showcase African-American lives in the City of Brotherly Love.
Scribe Video Center, based in West-Philly, is a non-profit that aims to enact changes in local communities through media. The films included in Senegal’s museum come from three of Scribe initiatives: the Precious Places Community History Project, dedicated to documenting Philadelphia’s neighborhoods, the Great Migration: A City Transformed, which examined the impact of Blacks fleeing the American South, and Muslim Voices of Philadelphia, while catalogues the experiences of Muslim communities in Philadelphia. The films were created by Philadelphia residents between 2004 and 2018, and showcases neighborhoods including Germantown and West Philadelphia.
Louis Massiah, Scibe’s founder and executive director, highlights the unique experience that comes from featuring a Philadelphia film in a Senegalese museum: “the best part of the program is seeing people get to know neighborhoods they might not otherwise feel invited into because they don’t live there, Massiah added, “what these pieces do is they allow us to see who our neighbors are and let the neighbors tell the story of the neighborhood that they live in, so they’re sort of self-defined stories of what’s going on.”
The exhibit in Senegal will be on display through 2019.