Sweet Harlem

Go behind the scenes of a world famous bakery.
Harlem Focus Docs

Make My Cake, a bakery based in Harlem, started with Josephine Smith “Ma Smith” baking out of her home, but when the demand became too high she opened her first store front in the neighborhood. The bakery now has two locations and is run by Ma Smith’s daughter, Aliyyah Baylor, who refers to all her costumers as sweeties.

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HarlemFocusDocs is a cooperative project of CCNY — Amsterdam News Urban Digital Media Lab in Collaboration with The Documentary Forum and The CCNY/BFA Documentary Workshops.

We’ll be releasing a documentary every Thursday for the next eight weeks.

Drawing from the rich tradition of independent documentary and still photography in the Harlem community, HarlemFocusDocs is an incubator for visual storytelling. On the HFD website students, of the BFA in Film and Video and the Journalism minor at The City College of New York, present a series of short character-based documentary films. These films highlight overlooked and under-reported aspects of the rich past and vibrant present of Harlem. Moving beyond mainstream “television style” reporting that is driven by on-camera talent and sound bites from politicians and civic leaders, these short films are visually inventive narrative portraits utilizing the voices of Harlemites. Each character embodies the resilient artistic and cultural spirit that has given Harlem its identity through good times and bad, and now must inform the community in this time of transition. Each year students will produce a “season” of short films for this web series featured on the website of The Amsterdam News, the iconic Black newspaper that gave voice to African American leaders including W.E.B. Dubois, Malcolm X and Adam Clayton Powell Jr.

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