South Side Home Movie Project Celebrates 20 Years

A still image from the Ramon Williams Collection capturing the 1955 Bud Billiken Parade.

Zoe Pharo, staff writer, Hyde Park Herald, Jul 28, 2025

Susan Carlotta Ellis hadn’t planned on attending a film screening at the Stony Island Arts Bank. She’d just wandered in, but found herself transfixed by a black and-white home movie from the 1930s of a Black, South Side family.

“It blew me away because you don’t see those depictions of family life of Black people,” Ellis said. “I could relate.”

She thought of her own family, who she described as the “Kodak, Polaroid family.” Both her parents shot films; her father’s style was static, while her mother got the action shots of summer trips to the family cabin in Michigan and to Disneyland in 1972. This footage amounted to more than 40 cartridges and cassettes that Ellis inherited after her parents’ death. 

But without children of her own, Ellis had started to worry in recent years about what would happen to these memories. 

It was at that screening almost a decade ago that Ellis met Jacqueline Stewart, the founder of the South Side Home Movie Project, the organization putting on the event. A few years later, Ellis decided to donate her films to the project.

“I’m proud of my family, and I think this will be the best way to keep at least my parents’ legacy and their relatives’ memory protected and preserved and respected,” Ellis said. “I think that’s the trust part of it, knowing that these pieces of history will be treasured, and respected and viewed by a wide audience.” 

Ellis’ home movies and thousands more are now stored  at the University of Chicago’s Logan Center for the Arts. A number of them are also currently on view in “The Act of Recording is an Act of Love: The South Side Home Movie Project,” the project’s 20th  anniversary exhibition.

 Stewart, a professor of cinema and media studies at the U. of C., started the project back in 2005 out of an interest in non-theatrical filmmaking and “orphan films.” This type of film generally falls outside of the commercial mainstream and has been abandoned or lost by its owner, meaning it needs preservation. 

A Hyde Park native, Stewart started placing ads and distributing flyers around the South Side, inviting people to donate their home movies to be archived and digitized. Stewart also interviewed donors.

“We ask them how their families came to Chicago and why, and tell us about the history of the neighborhood,” Stewart said. “It’s about how the films become a platform for these deeper discussions, not just about cultural history, but also about the history of the medium itself.”

Over 20 years, Stewart amassed a collection of more than 1,000 film reels spanning the 1920s to the 1980s. In 2019, the initiative became part of the U. of C.'s Arts + Public Life.

Much of the footage on display at the Logan Center captures intimate, domestic moments. In one collection from 1953, a young Susan McClelland sings and dances inside her family’s home. Other shots feature family trips to Buckingham Fountain, baseball games, car races and Detroit to visit relatives.

The collection is composed of film reels shot by Susan’s father, Ellis McClelland, who was born in Memphis and moved north during the Great Migration. After returning from World War II, he bought his own camera, and according to an exhibition description, taught himself to light, film and edit his own movies.

He and his wife raised two children in Princeton Park, Englewood and Chatham. "A skilled mechanic and business owner," McClelland is said to have found "joy in preserving intimate moments of family life and community."

Many films in the collection also capture big historical events, such as the 1963 student walkout of Chicago Public Schools and smoldering buildings in the wake of rioting after the 1968 assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Some of these events are on view at the exhibition. 

Other things captured in the footage, Stewart said, is a granular history of racial segregation in the neighborhood.

“When we look at footage of Jackson Park and the 57th Street Beach in the 1940s, it’s all white people,” Stewart said. “To have moving image documentation of the pervasiveness of racial segregation in Chicago and spaces that we now think of as interracial or Black spaces, I think that’s a really important reminder, and it becomes a really useful basis for discussion about the history of our communities.”

Stewart noted that the footage was shot primarily by middle-class families, giving a unique lens into this lifestyle. Some footage shows Black people traveling the world, boating on Lake Michigan, running real estate businesses and going out on the town dressed to the nines. 

“Their homes and their cars and the education they were able to give their kids, lots of graduation films and beautiful weddings — this has a really distinct meaning when talking about Black families, because of the tenuousness of middle class life for Black families,” Stewart said. “So there is a particular pride and care and joy that we see in these films.”

This footage, she continued, works to dispel misconceptions and stereotypes about Black life, particularly on the South Side. 

Inside the exhibition

The first thing attendees see when entering the exhibition is a floor-to-ceiling projection of a curated selection of these home movies paired with music. This series of films is part of “Spinning Home Movies” a South Side Home Movie Project initiative that  invited local DJs to perform alongside silent home movies. 

Elsewhere in the exhibition are family photos of donors and descriptions of who they were. There’s also video interviews with donors, similar to the interviews Stewart conducts with people when they give the archive their family films.

In another section of the exhibition, visitors can sit down in front of a computer, watch digitized footage and add their own commentary. This is part of the archive’s “community catalog,” which allows community members to help describe the films and add how they are meaningful to them. 

“We really wanted to create a way for people to find the kinds of things that would be of interest to them, not just scholars, but anyone who was interested in South Side history,” Stewart said.  

Other features of the 20th anniversary exhibition include projectors and film cameras, artistic projects created by students and artists in conjunction with films from the archive; and an iPad that lets attendees add a music track to some home movies.  

“The initial organizing principle was how to tell the story of this project of 20 years in a way that is engaging, dynamic, conveys the warmth, the intimate relationships that (are) embedded in the project,” said Sabrina Craig, the exhibition’s co-curator.  “(It’s) also interactive and feels very contemporary and in a way that makes sense in a gallery setting.”

The importance of archiving has only become clearer to Ellis. Three years ago, Ellis’ childhood home burned down. Luckily, Ellis had donated her films to the project two weeks prior, meaning they were spared from the fire. Though the home is gone, Ellis said she can still see it in the footage that’s been preserved

“So it was a blessing that I had donated that last footage,” she said.

Footage from Ellis’ home movie collection, will be screened as part of the exhibition on August 3. She plans to be there with biscuits, tea and peach cobbler.

“The Act of Recording is an Act of Love: The South Side Home Movie Project” is open through August 24, Tuesday through Saturday, 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. and Sunday, 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. A reception will be held Friday, August 15 from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. Register at events.uchicago.edu/event/sshmp-exh-reception.