P
assion almost led Mount Healthy native Latria Roberts to flee Cincinnati for a life in the big(ger) city — somewhere like Los Angeles or New York. But that passion, combined with a desire to give back to her hometown, ultimately kept Roberts here and is now breathing life back into what she hopes will become a local treasure: the Cincinnati Film Society.
The film society was first brought to life in 1979 — one year after Roberts was born — when Cincinnati Post entertainment editor Dale Stevens pushed for its creation. But the society folded around 2005 and eventually lost its nonprofit status.
In 2010, Roberts filed to reinstate the Cincinnati Film Society with the vision of establishing a home and resource for local budding filmmakers and movie lovers — for people like herself.
“As a little girl, I was a dreamer and was always trying to find ways to create,” Roberts says. In high school, she joined the theater program where she performed on stage and helped produce the morning news shows.
Roberts wanted to get into filmmaking, but she didn’t know of any local resources to help nurture her newfound curiosity after graduating from high school. She jokes that she went to U2 University, a nod to the band she’s seen in concert seven times. Accompanying her taste for music is her love for dance. If her life had taken any other path, she says, it would have been as a dancer.
Soon after high school, Roberts started working full time for the Cincinnati Arts Association, supporting the theater community she had come to love. Eventually, she started working part time so she could pursue other creative endeavors.
“I was always involved in the arts in some form,” Roberts says. “Around 2001 I became a part of the team for The Zone, which was a locally produced television show. On and off I joined local film projects and also produced a music project with 10 indie musicians.”
While working in front of and behind the camera on other artists’ passion projects, Roberts discovered her love for screenwriting. Her growing passion for filmmaking pushed her to start looking beyond Cincinnati to pursue her ambitions. She started researching the movie scenes in other cities, but her hometown heartstrings made her look twice at Cincinnati. And that’s when Roberts found something unexpectedly alluring: a void.
“When I discovered there was [a film society in Cincinnati] but it wasn’t active anymore, I got pretty excited and thought to myself, ‘I should rebirth it!’ and so that’s what I did,” Roberts says.
She continued to look to other cities, but this time for examples to mold the newly reinstated Cincinnati Film Society. In 2012, CFS kicked off with a screening of a local filmmaker’s documentary. By the following year, the film society offered a lineup of monthly screenings at The Greenwich as part of a “Movie at the Bar” series.
Meanwhile, Roberts worked with CFS board members to plan the next phase of the organization. In 2014, the organization launched the Emerging Filmmaker Award program to acknowledge filmmakers in the process of producing a short or feature film by awarding $500 to help with production costs. But the award’s first recipient says the recognition meant more than dollars.
“We were literally in the middle of filming a particular scene when I got the email,” says p.m. lipscomb, a Hamilton-born, self-taught filmmaker. He and his crew were filming Willa’s Peach, a short feature film that tells the story of a young girl being abducted, as told through the girl’s perspective. lipscomb had applied for the award with the script for Willa’s Peach in December 2014. When he got the news in January that he had won, the whole set lit up, he says. “It’s one of those motivating moments in life when you realize that you can keep pushing this thing and now you can go even further.”
lipscomb, who has made 25 short films and two features in the past nine years, met Roberts at a screening and learned about CFS and, eventually, the Emerging Filmmaker Award.
“She’s been a huge support, a huge provider,” lipscomb says. “It’s good to have somebody in the middle of it that has actually been out there in the thick of it. Latria has a really interesting point of view of cinema.”
Willa’s Peach is now in postproduction and looking for additional funding. Though lipscomb typically shoots around Cincinnati — Willa’s Peach was shot in town and on a farm in Blanchester — he hopes to one day shoot in places as far away as Okinawa, Japan.
“I’ve never made a film on the idea of where I’ve been located. But I’ve definitely tapped Cincinnati. I’ve squeezed the city,” he says.
Roberts hopes more people do the same. She says the recent boom in major feature film production in Cincinnati can help connect the local film community. While working on sets like Don Cheadle’s Miles Ahead, Roberts says she ran into people she knew, but she hadn’t known they shared a love of movies.
“There are more people that have a passion for film than the general public realizes,” she says. “Part of my vision is that Hollywood would not just see Cincinnati as a place to come shoot film but that there would be more independent filmmakers wanting to live in Cincinnati and creating their projects here.”
To do that, Roberts hopes to create a permanent base for filmmakers. She is currently in talks with a business owner in the West End — the neighborhood her father grew up in and a place that she says has a special place in her heart — about using his space as a movie café where moviegoers and filmmakers can come together to screen movies and talk filmmaking.
She hopes to one day have a dedicated learning center and theater. For now, Roberts and Cincinnati Film Society are working on an IndieGoGo fundraising campaign and budgeting for the next five years. While she doesn’t have much time for her own projects, still working part time at the Cincinnati Arts Association and building the film society, Roberts says she knows why she’s here.
“I believe in this mission and this organization and its potential to help with independent film in Cincinnati,” she says. “I believe in Cincinnati.” ©
This article appears in Mar 18-24, 2015.
