Special Events
Film Screening: The Inheritance
Sun Feb 16, 2025 | 3:30 PM
VIFF Centre - Vancity Theatre | 1181 Seymour Street
Still from Ephraim Asili, The Inheritance, 2020, Courtesy of the Artist
Join us for a screening of The Inheritance (2020), the inventive first feature from Ephraim Asili that weaves together the history of the MOVE liberation group, the Black Arts Movement and the filmmaker’s own formative experiences in a Black Marxist collective.
This event is being presented as part of the Gallery’s Celebrating Black Futures programming. Find out more »
ABOUT THE FILM
The Inheritance, 2020
Directed by Ephraim Asili
102 minutes
The inheritance is a house in Philadelphia bequeathed to Julian (Eric Lockley) by his grandmother. He asks his girlfriend Gwen (Nozipho Mclean) to move in, and next thing he knows there’s an entire collective, The House of Ubutu, a commune that will be a safe space for Black folk. On the wall, prominently, there is a poster for Godard’s radical Maoist movie La Chinoise, and this is clearly a key inspiration for writer-director Ephraim Asili: primary colour-coded costumes and production design, dialetical montage and conversations conducted in quoration marks. Others include Julius K. Nyerere’s Essays on Socialism and Sonia Sanchez’s poetry, both quoted explicitly, alongside a dissertation on the Nuer language of South Sudan and a fair bit of free jazz. It’s heady but playful, a call to arms that resonates loud and clear.