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The Inheritance (Ephraim Asili, 2020)
🕑 Added 2020-09-27 02:53:07 +0000 UTC
I'm actually a bit envious of those viewers for whom the righteous glory of The Inheritance appears to be coming out of nowhere. This often when an experimental filmmaker crosses the threshold and enters slightly more accessible territory, but so often the forms and ideas that made that artist special in the first place get lost in translation. Not here. The Inheritance is the logical consequence of the political aesthetic that Asili has been honing, and perfecting, for years.
He's best known for the Diaspora Suite, a group of five films made between 2011 and 2017. The last of those films, Fluid Frontiers, found Asili and a group of performers paying homage to the Afrocentric poetry and theory published in the 1960s and 70s by Detroit's Broadside Press. This work, largely forgotten until recently, included the work of poet Sonia Sanchez, who is prominently featured in The Inheritance. So in a way, this film is a kind of physical instantiation of the revival of that long-suppressed Black radicalism, "the sixties" bursting forth as a possible solution to the crises of Black life in 2019/2020.
Julien (Eric Lockley) has inherited a house in Philly from his grandmother. Inside the house, he finds a chest filled with radical Black literature, and this inspires him to convert the house into a shared space for experimental shared living, according to the socialist principles of the African elders: the House of Ubutu. His girlfriend Gwen (Nozipho Mclean) is the first member, and eventually the commune (although that's not the right word -- it immediately conjures images of white bell-bottom wearing hippies smoking weed) is nine residents strong. Before long, the House of Ubutu is making plans to open to the public as a reading room / community center.
Woven right through the center of The Inheritance is the history of MOVE, the Black separatist collective led by John Africa in the 1980s. After various complaints by neighbors (mostly about the smell of their livestock and compost), the Philly Police raided the compound under the pretext of serving a warrant. A firefight ensued, and a police helicopter dropped a bomb on MOVE's apartment, killing seven MOVE members, including five children. Asili does not force the point -- he hardly needs to -- but this too is part of the inheritance that the men and women of Ubutu must grapple with. When the group is debating about who to invite as a guest speaker, Old Head (Julian Rozzell Jr.), who is indeed a bit older than the others in the group, suggests a Black gun rights advocate. The younger members resist, but he is adamant. "We're getting killed out there."
In its visual style and approach, The Inheritance borrows very liberally from Godard's La Chinoise. That film is about a group of French youth trying to live a collective, anti-capitalist existence an accordance with the teachings of Mao. They fail. Asili's vision is far more optimistic. The biggest problems we witness involve Gwen's distaste for Julien's politically incorrect friend Rich (Chris Jarell), and the expected struggles when nine people share a single bathroom.
Part of this success, it seems, has to do with the fact of Julien being in possession of a space relatively apart from the violence that defines so much of Black public life. So ownership undergirds the Ubutu project: you have to have something before you can share it. And in a way, this could be seen as a metaphor for the film itself, and Asili's rightful seizure of the cinematic means of production. As Stephanie (Aniya Picou) tells Gwen, it's the college-educated white people who always make a fetish out of her "street knowledge," telling her she doesn't need to go to school. The Inheritance gives the finger to this liberal claptrap, showing the Black cultural and intellectual wealth that is right there for the taking.
