PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — Shameka Sawyer founded her nonprofit, 5 Shorts Project, in 2014 after her oldest brother died from brain cancer. She says filmmaking was a kind of therapy for her, allowing her to channel the pain of losing her best friend into a creative passion.
"We used to make funny videos all the time," she said. "When I was in college, he was diagnosed with brain cancer. And I was looking for a sense of community to help me process and deal with losing my oldest brother."
The 5 Shorts Project is a mentorship program that teaches young people of color how to create short films that represent their lived experiences. The goal is to encourage and support independent filmmakers, and to create space for equal and more diverse representation in media.
"We want to amplify those voices more because we are trying to dismantle some of the stereotypes around our culture. And we want to create stories from our perspective, written in our words, so people can get a better sense of who we are as different people."
Sawyer’s latest mission was inspired by her younger brother, Allen Taylor, a father, caretaker, and entrepreneur. He was her last living sibling. Last year he was murdered a week shy of his 35th birthday.
"Gun violence in Philadelphia is out of control. So, he basically got two or three seconds on the news, and no one knew who he was. It was this man who was shot in Germantown and was taken to the hospital. And that was it. No picture of him, no nothing."
She was inspired to demonstrate who her brother was, and what he meant to the many people who loved him.
"So I created a short documentary about him, just as, like, therapy for myself as … a way to humanize my brother, because I really didn’t like how his murder was covered in media," she said.
That film, "Sometimes I Cry in June," paints a fuller, more vibrant picture of Taylor's whole life. He was more than just a statistic of Philadelphia’s gun violence crisis, to be counted among the more than 500 lives lost to homicide in 2020.
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Sawyer wants to teach those same narrative documentary filmmaking skills to teens who have lost someone to gun violence. Through the project, named "Bout Mine" after her brother’s t-shirt line, she hopes to show them how to be stewards of their loved one's memory, and to pour their emotions into a short documentary about that person, so they can do justice to their life as well.
"But not from the perspective of the murder," she said, "but more so, again, to humanize the person that they lost and to show people that the person they lost meant something to them, and this is what they meant."
Ultimately, Sawyer is hoping that, by giving teens an outlet for creative expression, she may be able to prevent more lives from being lost.
"Just having them learn that you don’t always have to fight negativity with negativity, that there’s other ways that you can deal with something that’s not working in your favor. There are ways for you to process and deal with what you’re feeling and what you’re going through. There’s people here who care and want to help you through your emotions, and they’re trained to do so."
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Sawyer has also started a Facebook fundraiser in hope of one day paying participants for sharing their stories.
"I want to make sure young people understand that you can do what you love and get paid for it. Many kids are dealing with so many different issues — hunger and not having food at the house. So I just wanted to make sure that they will be okay as part of this project. They’ll be fed. They’ll make their own money. They’ll learn a skill. And they’ll also learn that they are important and that their voices matter. That’s my main goal."
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Sawyer says it's time to stop depending on other people to save us or to do the right thing.
"We forget how much power we have on our own, to create change and to inspire influence."
More information about the Bout Mine gun violence prevention program is on the 5 Shorts website.