For filmmaker Juli Wert, Like A Fire That Consumes All of It is more than just a short film; it’s a time capsule.

Recorded over a span of six months, Like A Fire brewed for three years before ever seeing the light of day. Or, in this case, the light of screens. Wert sifted through six hours of footage before landing on a cohesive product that felt more like a scrapbook of moments and people in her life than a fictional movie. After all, that’s what it is.

“I really just brought my camera around constantly,” the now-26-year-old Philadelphian said of her 22-year-old self. “At any moment, I was filming. I did it scene by scene, so I would shoot for a week and a half, maybe, and a couple of things would happen, and I would import all that and edit it.”

The process continued that way: film, import, edit, rinse, repeat. Wert produced batches of footage this way, compiling snapshots of her life that soon melded into their own story.

“It was a very long stewing process, where I had some people watch it,” she said. “They would kind of tell me where it dragged down, and I just chipped away at it for a couple of years. Also, that space let me watch it more impartially, in a way, because I could just make [the people in the movie] into characters.”

One of these characters, in particular, is the setting itself: the City of Brotherly Love. “[In] a lot of my films, we try hard to make Philadelphia a character. You see a film in New York, and it’s a New York movie. It just adds an entire font to it. I feel like it’s very important that the stories that are set in Philadelphia, for me, are set in Philadelphia,” she explained. 

Philadelphia almost wasn’t the home base of Wert, though, as she originally enrolled at the Savannah College of Art and Design in Savannah, Georgia. However, the pandemic forced Wert back home. It was then that she began freelancing, dabbling in a range of camera-based jobs. “I’ve kind of always mixed together music and movies,” she said. “I do a lot of live concerts and live photography, music videos. I just kind of create so much, and I just have a lot of really talented people around me who also create constantly. It’s very fun, and I love it so much.”

People are the heart of Like A Fire, where the film forces the viewer to watch it simultaneously like a participant on a FaceTime call with friends and as a voyueristic fly-on-the-wall. Scripted moments blend seamlessly with the candid, making a collage of both the genuine and the simulated.

“I don’t talk to any of those people anymore, really,” Wert admitted. “I’ve been split up with that partner for two years now. I’m a year into another relationship. I don’t live in that house anymore. My old band kind of broke up. We’ve all been doing our own things since. The other character, Sara— we don’t really talk much anymore, either. So it’s very weird having a time capsule. In some ways, it sort of feels like that museum of failure, of this is what I had, and now it’s completely different. But it’s not a bad thing that things are different.”

Looking towards the future, Wert continues to produce short films that focus on the experiences of people—though, perhaps, less on those directly tied to her life. “I have a short right now that I’m working on, and I’m sort of getting into the crowdfunding phase of it right now. It’s called Remaining Balance, and it’s a story about memories brought up when you finish an old gift card,” she said. “It’s just a couple of these memories of a relationship before it’s about to crumble.”

Though this film travels in an opposing direction than Like A Fire, the latter will always nest itself into a special crook of Wert’s heart. Wert’s artist friend, Jack Sterling, said of Like A Fire that it was “a good poem, and a good poem is based on its last line.” In this “poem,” the resolution comes in the form of tarot cards and voicemails.

“I’m happy that I’ll have that representation of who I was forever,” Wert concluded. “It’s very truthful. I film to keep history.”

Like A Fire That Consumes All of It can be watched on Wert’s website.

Photos courtesy of Juli Wert | Interviewed on August 11, 2025