Last month, the Uptown Theater’s marquee lit up again.

Not with a headliner’s name. With North Philadelphia’s own faces, oral histories from the neighborhood are thrown across the shuttered marquee by a laser projector, with chairs and speakers set up on the far side of Broad Street. Buses rolled past. People came out of their houses and sat down.

“It really made me feel proud,” Louis Massiah recalls hearing from residents who live across the street. “It’s not just like an empty old movie theater.”

That is the whole thesis of Massiah’s life’s work, compressed into one summer night: a building nobody uses, a wall nobody looks at, a vacant lot, and then a film, and then the place is never quite the same again.

For roughly three decades, Massiah has been doing exactly that across Philadelphia through Street Movies!, the free outdoor screening series run by Scribe Video Center, the West Philadelphia institution he founded in 1982. This year’s series runs Aug. 12-30 at community spaces around the city, each night pairing short films with live performance and conversation. Admission is free. It always has been.

Ask Massiah where Street Movies! came from, and he corrects the premise of the question first.

“Normally, whenever anything creative happens, it’s usually from a confluence of inspirations and influences,” he says.

The first was a memory. Massiah grew up in North Philadelphia in the 1960s when the Society Hill Playhouse ran a street theater program with a flatbed truck, lights and actors that would pull into a neighborhood and perform.

“They transformed the neighborhood,” he says. “You could never see that vacant lot the same again. It had forever been transformed.”

The second came from Burkina Faso. Massiah began attending the Pan-African Film and Television Festival of Ouagadougou, or FESPACO, where outdoor screenings sit alongside the indoor programs. Partaking in that, he shares, was “absolutely wonderful.”

The third was a colleague, Dorothea Bremer, who came to Scribe as a Temple University graduate student and a question Scribe had been circling since its founding: whether documentary film and audio could be community art forms rather than only commercial products.

Massiah says filmmaking should be “more than just for commercial theaters, streaming, and screens or universities.” How can filmmaking be a community art form of the highest level? It’s not just about making the work; it’s also about how the communities that helped create it can see it.

Then the technology caught up. By the ‘90s, digital projection became good enough and light enough that you no longer needed the apparatus of a film print and a projectionist to put a movie on a wall.

Massiah notes he later learned that Atlanta’s African Film Society had been screening African films in parks with projectors years earlier, a circle that includes photographer Sue Ross, still working in Atlanta, and the writer Toni Cade Bambara, whose name comes up again and again in his thinking.

“We said, hey, let’s do this project,” Massiah recalls. “So we began Street Movies!”

The idea that a film’s worth is measured in ticket sales or streaming numbers is one Massiah rejects outright, and he has a vocabulary for the alternative, borrowed from Bambara.

“The criteria for the success of a film does not need to be how many eyeballs see the screen or how many dollars are generated by the film,” he says. Instead, he asks whether a specific, identified audience will be empowered by seeing it or be able to use what it contains.

That is what Bambara called the authenticating audience. Massiah argues the clarity runs backward as well as forward: the sharper a filmmaker is about who that audience is, the sharper the film itself becomes.

“Film doesn’t just have to be a commodity,” he says. “Film can be something that actually strengthens a community. It can be cultural work that helps with the democratic process, because people can define their issues and share those issues with people in and outside the community.”

For independent filmmakers, especially Black filmmakers, the slim chances of acceptance at Sundance make the cost of festival submission fees a poor choice. It is a strategy. It says the screening is not a marketing stop, it is a conversation you are either starting or continuing.

Scribe runs roughly a dozen Street Movies! locations a year, concentrated in August, deliberately scheduled after the BlackStar Film Festival wraps. A companion series, Street Movies Undercover, moves the work indoors during the colder months.

But the location is never the first decision, and Scribe does not simply arrive.

“We don’t just come into a neighborhood,” Massiah shares. The organization builds on relationships it already has and documentary language and then authors films about its blocks, histories and futures. Scribe facilitates the neighbors directly.

Scribe’s programmers, Kiera Abdur-Rahman and Will Michael, bring an international eye with work from Brazil, West Africa, Europe, Asia and across the United States.

“They’re looking at many films from all over the world,” Massiah says, “but they’re also listening to what community groups are interested in. So it’s a collaborative process.”

Massiah’s most recent film is about Bambara, a portrait constructed as a series of lessons that will screen at Atlanta’s BronzeLens Film Festival on Saturday, Aug. 22.

At a recent New York screening, an attendee who saw the film at BlackStar last year told Massiah that one of the film’s lessons stayed with him: the question of what your plan is. What is our plan on this planet? What is our plan with this life?

He decided his plan was to program. He went home and started a screening series, Sankofa, now running in New York.

That, for Massiah, is the metric.

“If the film is useful to the audience members, if it can inspire them to do some act, it helps strengthen the community,” he explains. “I feel very gratified.”

He lives in North Philadelphia. He works in West Philadelphia. Every August, he sets up chairs in the lots, schoolyards and rec centers, which may be the simplest version of his argument. Film can be a transformative thing. But first somebody has to go outside.

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Kathia Woods

Filmmaker Louis Massiah measures film's success by audiences impact