There’s something for everyone at the Fourth Annual United We Heal Film Festival: documentaries, animation, narrative, experimental films. There are two very important things they all have in common: They are all shorts — 30 minutes is the cutoff. And they each address the healing of the Black community from oppression. Organized by filmmaker Ebony Roberts, the unique social justice film festival offers an opportunity for short films written, produced, and directed by Black and Brown filmmakers to reach a wider audience.
United We Heal Film Festival takes its name from the short film Roberts produced in 2020 in response to the deaths of Black Americans at the hands of the police and subsequent protests. Roberts first became enamored with cinema when she saw Back to the Future at seven years old. It’s not the most traditionally cited vehicle for sparking a love of filmmaking, but the exciting element of time travel, combined with the wonder and storytelling magic of producer Steven Spielberg, hooked her.
“My mom was a single parent, so TV kind of raised me,” Roberts explains. “So storytelling has always been appealing to me, and I’ve always had a sauce back in my heart for the heartwarming and the underdog type of story, those types of things. But the other side is my mother always instilled in me that, you know what, they’re not necessarily representative of who you are as a person. And I never really understood it being younger. But Mom was right.”
Roberts earned a degree in Communications and Broadcasting from the University of Pittsburgh. She then teamed up with her two sisters on a web series called Global Lipstick, a stylish travel vlog with a dash of comedy. They next combined their respective strengths to wear all the hats needed to run the production company they started: Roberts is the producer; one sister is the writer, and the other is the company administrator. Roberts is also an associate producer for QVC’s studio broadcast team.
United We Heal, the film
Until 2020, Roberts had worked on films but had never made a film. While the pandemic kept most of us at home, the execution of George Floyd and its aftermath played out on television. Two-and-a-half months earlier, Breonna Taylor was shot to death inside her Louisville, KY home by plainclothes police officers acting on a no-knock warrant in pursuit of an ex-boyfriend who did not live there. When officers broke through Taylor’s door in the middle of the night, her partner, mistaking them for intruders, shot at them, prompting the police to fire over 30 rounds, killing Taylor and putting bullets through walls into the neighbor’s home.
“So during 2020, you know … Yeah, 2020.” Roberts lets out the long sigh. “We had the racial awakening time period where we saw the execution of George Floyd, and that hit me. But Breonna Taylor hit me harder only because I saw myself in her, and she was literally just sleeping in her house.”
The emotional impact, Roberts suspects, was exacerbated not just by identifying with a victim, but by everyone sitting with themselves during that time, in their homes, in the same way Taylor was when she was killed.
“I’m a big fan of Nina Simone. She has a quote that’s something like, An artist’s duty is to reflect the times. And this is a time where I was like, this has to happen. It’s now,” she says. “It’s that thing where God’s like, Okay, I put this on your heart. I put this in you. And when you make that decision, things just start to fall into place.”
Roberts’ idea first came to her as poetry accompanied by dancers. She didn’t know any poets or dancers, so she used social media to reach out to strangers whose work she admired and, in two weeks, built her cast through DMs. Within a month, she had locations and a schedule. The shoot itself took four days. From conception to post-production, the process took about 10 weeks.
United We Heal is a work of art. It’s niche, Roberts says, which is why she hasn’t yet found a distributor she feels is right for it. The film is in three acts, representing her vision of Black people’s past, present, and future. Feeling and hearing the words is most essential to the experience, so there is no music. There are instead stretches of silence, visual repeating epithets, and detailed choreography between the dancers and the dramatic readings by the poets.
United We Heal, the film festival
Taking United We Heal on the film festival circuit first put the idea of holding her own event into Roberts’ mind. Black and Brown filmmakers have limited platforms as it is for features, but for short films, where most filmmakers cut their teeth, there aren’t nearly enough. After building a network within the Philadelphia film industry, she ran the idea of hosting a movie night featuring short films. This simple idea evolved into a full-fledged film festival whose theme would be social justice and healing. She chose to name the event after her own short film.
“I feel a lot of the time when we as Black people, as a Black community, go through these traumatic events, too much is placed on the trauma and not enough on us going through these things and healing from these things and coming up with solutions for us to not necessarily not experience them, but to work through that trauma,” Roberts says.
Roberts views film as an especially impactful art form for expressing and exposing injustice, societal failures and human suffering, particularly for those who haven’t experienced such traumas.
“Film, to me, does that to people. It stirs up questions and emotions and opens up your perspective to things that you have no idea about. And it motivates you to take a deeper look and to move in a different way than you would have before,” she says. “I think when your eyes are open to certain things, that’s scary. It’s frightening. But it also piques curiosity. And if your heart is in the right place or even if that curiosity is in the right place, then that will compel you to do more than you would have done before.”
This year marks the fourth United We Heal Film Festival. Held at Underground Arts, it’s expanded to two days, beginning June 18 with a welcome concert to set the vibe with Philly-based artists BRTHWRK Ft Ivy Sole, Kingsley Ibeneche, Lee Clark and Quelle Chris. Cyrenity Sips, a Black-owned small-batch winery based in Hatboro, has collaborated on a launch of a new rosé for the event. In keeping with the festival theme, a licensed therapist will be on hand to speak with attendees about healing from trauma.
Day two of the festival is June 20, featuring 11 social justice themed short films by people of color including Kyra Knox, Darryl Wyrick, Jard Lerebours, and Alec Tufenkjian. Hosted by Deante Kyle of the Grits & Eggs Podcast, the screenings will be followed by a panel discussion and Q&A with the filmmakers. Three prizes will be awarded, including a jury-selected winner and an audience-selected winner. In previous years, the screenings generally ended with an unofficial networking event, but this year there’s an official after party featuring DJ Zack Fox.
“We’re gonna take you through a journey, like where we set you up with the good vibes,” says Roberts. “The films are gonna be kind of intense, but we make a program where it’s not depressing. As we build you up, then kind of bring it back down, then build you back up again. You’re gonna feel a lot of things. But then the after party is going to give us all that collective release that we’re gonna need to carry us through these times moving forward.”
United We Heal Film Festival is at Underground Arts June 18 for the pre-game concert and June 20 for the screenings and after-party.
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