The Inheritance

After nearly a decade exploring different facets of the African diaspora — and his own place within it — which resulted in his Diaspora Suite (Courtisane festival 2018), Ephraim Asili makes his feature-length debut with The Inheritance, an astonishing ensemble work set almost entirely within a West Philadelphia house where a community of young, Black artists and activists form a collective. A scripted drama of characters attempting to work towards political consensus — based partly on Asili’s own experiences in a Black liberationist group as well as Jean-Luc Godard’s La Chinoise (see also Vincent Meesen’s Juste un mouvement in the FFG program) — weaves with a documentary recollection of the Philadelphia liberation group MOVE, the victim of a notorious police bombing in 1985. Ceaselessly finding commonalties between politics, humor, and philosophy, with Black authors and radicals at its edges, The Inheritance is a remarkable film about the world as we know it.


In the presence of Ephraim Asili