Saturday, February 1, 2025

THE INHERITANCE



I’ll be the first to admit that I sometimes feel intimidated to write about certain specific movies that I consider to be great. These occurrences are few and far between (as they should be), but sometimes a film is so good there’s almost nothing to say outside of recommending it to as many people as possible. You can only gush about a movie so much until it starts to sound cringey. In this current age of Letterboxd/film twitter movie comedians, it’s sometimes difficult to tell if someone genuinely loves a movie or if they’re just being hyperbolic to try and get laughs & attention. If a movie is truly great I don’t think there should be any memefication involved. Ephraim Asili’s The Inheritance is one of those movies. For the last 4-1/2 I’ve been singing it’s praises on podcasts and all forms of social media, but I haven’t put down any substantial words (this movie was at the top of my best of 2020 list a few years ago). The story of The Inheritance may sound like it was made for a very niche audience within a subgenre of people, but I honestly believe it can be “appreciated” by anyone. The basic story of a group of pan-Africanists in west Philadelphia that set out to make their own isolated collective/community away from the rest of the world sounds very niche and specific. But this movie tackles/touches on/circles around issues like white supremacy, separatism, gun ownership/gun control, the creation of art, activism, the deconstruction of traditional education, and more (a big part of this film’s identity is connected to the Move bombing that took place in Philadelphia four decades ago). Everyone from disingenuous Fox News-watching “conservatives” to pretentious surface-level twitter liberals that would call the police on the same Black folks they claim to care about can find something important to hold on to in The Inheritance (anyone notice how a lot of today’s so-called MAGA folks and certain sectors of modern-day pro Black folks have a lot more in common than they care to admit?)
Strangely enough, the one audience that might take issue with this movie is the growing cult of Foundational Black Americans that believe in delineation between Black Americans and Africans & Caribbean (I don’t want to get too much in to FBAs but if you’ve ever wanted to go down a very strange internet rabbit hole – look in to them). This movie is truly pan-Africanist and doesn’t promote delineation between Black people. 

If you’re just a film enthusiast then you might appreciate all the homages and visual callbacks to folks Ousmane Sembene & Jean Luc Godard...


Stylistically, the film is deeply influenced by Jean-Luc Godard’s La Chinoise (1967). When I first got around to watching the film in grad school, I was floored - Ephraim Asili, Artforum
La Chinoise / The Inheritance

La Chinoise / The Inheritance


I first encountered Sembène in film school and was struck by his powerful critique of Senegalese society - Ephraim Asili, criterion
Black Girl /
The Inheritance


Asili also namedrops Dreyer & Bresson as sources of inspiration but those are more spiritual rather than visual…

One Big influence was Robert Bresson, who was influenced by the minimal set design of Carl Theodore Dreyer films. I would ask myself ‘what connotes a kitchen, or a living room' and leave the design there – Ephraim Asili, Bomb Magazine
Ordet /
Pickpocket /
The Inheritance

Ivan Dixon's The Spook Who Sat By The Door was another source on inspiration on Ephraim Asili (a Spook poster can be seen in the background of The Inheritance). 


 


 I’m using terms & phrases like “appreciate” or “find something to hold on to” rather than “enjoy” because I genuinely don’t think this was made to be “enjoyed” in the traditional sense. This isn’t a traditional movie. A big part of what makes The Inheritance so unique is that it’s almost uncategorizable. On one hand it’s very serious and sometimes traumatic. But other times the movie is incredibly lighthearted, sweet and funny. It also doesn’t really fit in to a specific category or genre. It’s a hybrid scripted narrative/documentary that plays with reality & fiction.


There’s a nice-sized audience of Black film enthusiasts that claim to want something “different” and/or “challenging” that isn’t some remix of Jordan Peele’s Get Out. Well – here it is (hopefully you'll see that this movie can also serve as a gateway to so many different lanes & avenues of cinephilia). The inheritance can be streamed on Apple TV, Amazon Prime and Grasshopper films. It isn’t 1999. Folks can’t keep using the excuse that a movie didn’t come to their city or small town. Thanks to streaming (and even file/torrent sharing), independent/”art house” films are now easier than ever to see. Instead of complaining on twitter about how there are too many slave movies, you could do some very basic surface level exploration and find a world of Black cinema that might cater to your needs. 

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