EMPAC-Commissioned Film to be Screened at National Gallery of Art During Inauguration Week
Filmed in colorful 16mm and featured in this year’s New York Film Festival, The Inheritance weaves together filmmaker Ephraim Asili’s personal recollections of life in a West Philadelphia group house with a treasure trove of recorded histories by Black activists, resistors, and freedom fighters. Photographs, books, records, speeches, and poetry inform a story of Philadelphia’s MOVE organization, the self-sufficient separatist collective that infamously became the target of a fatal police bombing in 1985. The Inheritance is also a tribute to influential artists and orators such as Sonia Sanchez, who appears in the film; other icons like Shirley Chisholm, Angela Davis, Betye Saar, and Alma Thomas, all referenced in archival images or footage; and Jean-Luc Godard, whose marquee poster for the 1967 film La Chinoise appears in several kitchen scenes. Asili’s work offers an “homage to the insurrectionary potential of engaged literature,” according to film scholar and curator Greg de Cuir Jr. (Ephraim Asili, 2020, 100 minutes)
Main Image: Ephraim Asili, Production still from The Inheritance. Photo: Mick Bello/EMPAC.
