Her brother was fatally shot in Germantown. She wants to show that her old neighborhood is about more than just loss.

Shameka Sawyer has good memories of growing up in Germantown.

Neighbors were tight on her family’s block of Belfield Avenue. People looked out for each other, cared for one another, and good luck trying to get away with anything.

But she also has some memories that aren’t so positive. Hardworking men and women she grew up around got caught in the crack epidemic of the 1990s, and disagreements that were once settled with fists escalated to gunfire.

In the last four years alone, there have been 242 shootings so far in Germantown — including one that claimed her youngest brother’s life in 2020.

On June 1, Allen Taylor, 34, was shot and killed just half a block from the home he shared with his mother and son.

Nearly four years later, his death remains another of the city’s many unsolved homicides.

Sawyer, 46, found herself wrestling with uncomfortable feelings about the neighborhood she once proudly called home.

Families, including her own, have come and gone. (She’d since moved over the neighborhood border to West Oak Lane. Her mother joined her a year after her brother was killed.) But they were well-known around the area, and everyone knew her brother, an aspiring musician who was building a clothing line.

Someone, she thought, must have seen or heard something. So why had no one come forward? Where was the neighborhood love and loyalty she felt when she grew up there?

Angry and disappointed, the Philadelphia filmmaker, who in 2014 created the 5 Shorts Project to teach filmmaking to Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) youth, turned to her camera — the one thing that always helped her make sense of the world. She did the same thing right after her brother was killed. Then, she produced a poignant video that was part eulogy, part love letter to a lost sibling.

Now, she turned the camera on the community she felt herself pulling away from.

“I wanted to take back that power,” she told me. “I felt like I gave the power away to whoever did this to my brother to change my feelings about a place I used to love. And I wanted to change that narrative for myself.”

She started by going to the old Mallery Playground on East Johnson Street, close to where her brother was shot, and remembering the day her brother recorded a music video there with a bunch of neighborhood kids in the background.

“He was so excited, and the kids were so excited,” she said. “I remembered that moment, and I thought, you know what? That was a beautiful moment, and there are beautiful things here in Germantown. And I just want to focus on amplifying that, amplifying the beauty of Germantown, because I can’t blame the area for what happened. It was a person that did this. It wasn’t the area.”

She and a group of her young filmmakers are creating a series of one-minute promotional videos on Instagram about Germantown businesses in collaboration with Germantown Info Hub, including Our House Culture Center, a community art and event space, ARTrageous Brush and Flow, a creative and paint and sip studio, and D’griot, a community gallery and cafe.

Sawyer wanted to call attention to small businesses that serve as staples and safe havens in communities all over the city. But she also wanted the videos to serve as a reminder of how much more lies beyond the statistics and headlines.

That resonated with me. There isn’t a day that goes by where I don’t hear from someone — who usually doesn’t live in Philadelphia — writing off the city based on its worst moments, as if any of them, however horrible, is the sum of a metropolis of more than 1.5 million people.

And yet, here was someone who had legitimate reasons to give up on her old neighborhood, instead choosing to amplify its better parts — even while the city’s gun violence continues to threaten her family. A year after her brother was gunned down, his then-16-year-old son was shot. And while the cases don’t seem to be related, no one has been identified in that shooting, either.

Amir Taylor is 19 now and is one of the project’s participants. He shares some of his aunt’s feelings of disappointment. There are times, he told me, when he gets a sense that people might be holding back. But even if one day someone does choose to help them get justice, he said, “it won’t bring my father back.”

That is the sad reality that no amount of healing or community outreach can change.

But there is also something else — something that’s easy to lose sight of on our worst days, like the one we had on Wednesday, when what was supposed to be a joyful Eid al-Fitr celebration in a West Philadelphia park ended in chaos, leaving three people shot, five arrested, and the city’s Muslim community shaken.

The comments all over social media and in my inbox were as damning as they were predictable, so I was glad to hear from Police Commissioner Kevin Bethel.

In comments he made at the scene of the shooting, he didn’t hold back when he blamed the culture of youth gun violence for disrupting an otherwise peaceful celebration. But he was also quick to say they were not representative of the people who had gathered to celebrate the end of Ramadan.

“Ninety-nine percent of the individuals at this event are good people,” he said.

In Philadelphia’s seemingly endless cycle of calamity and chaos, we tend to overlook the good in our city and instead focus our attention on the bad because, frankly, some days there is an overabundance of bad, and no amount of positivity alone will make us safer.

But even on days when individuals or individual acts are dragging us down, threatening to pull us under, we should do our best to remember that there are always more of us putting in the work, keeping the faith, and believing we can rise above.