Critics' Pick "Ephraim Asili's debut feature film, beautifully abandons genre to consider questions about community, art and Black liberation"
  —New York Times

"A Godardian portrait of black activism... While Asili has constructed an ambitious and often unsettling narrative, it doubles as a joyous celebration of Blackness, and an invitation for all audiences to contemplate their own inheritance"
  —IndieWire

"A dynamic inquiry into revolutionary culture and Black identity"
  —Hollywood Reporter

"Playful, erudite, and boundary-blurring"
  —Cinema Scope

"It is didactic without losing its sense of organicism; it is radical without losing its sense of humor; it is intentional in its visual and formal design without flattening itself to the status of aesthetic image emptied of its politics."
  —Los Angeles Times

½ "An engrossing, challenging film that allures and confronts you in equal measure"
  —RogerEbert.com

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Pennsylvania-born filmmaker Ephraim Asili has been exploring different facets of the African diaspora, and his own place within it, for nearly a decade. His feature-length debut, The Inheritance, is an engaging ensemble work that takes place almost entirely within the walls of a West Philadelphia house where a community of young people have come together to form a collective of Black artists and activists.

Based partly on Asili's own experiences in a Black liberationist group, the film interweaves a scripted drama of characters attempting to work towards political consensus with a documentary recollection of the Philadelphia liberation group MOVE, which was the victim of a notorious police bombing in 1985. Asili's film is an endlessly generative work of politics, humor, and philosophy, referencing the legacies of the Black Arts Movement and featuring Black authors and radicals, members of MOVE, as well as poets Ursula Rucker and Sonia Sanchez. The Inheritance urgently summons the past in today's continued fight for racial and social justice through a mix of fact and fiction, portraits and performances.

Directed by Ephraim Asili, U.S.A., 2020, 102 mins.

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