FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC
USA / 2020 / 100 minutes
After nearly a decade exploring different facets of the African diaspora — and his own place within it — Ephraim Asili makes his feature-length debut with The Inheritance, an astonishing ensemble work set almost entirely within a West Philadelphia house where a community of young, Black artists and activists form a collective. A scripted drama of characters attempting to work towards political consensus — based partly on Asili’s own experiences in a Black liberationist group — weaves with a documentary recollection of the Philadelphia liberation group MOVE, the victim of a notorious police bombing in 1985. Ceaselessly finding commonalties between politics, humor, and philosophy, with Black authors and radicals at its edges, The Inheritance is a remarkable film about the world as we know it.
Ephraim Asili will be in conversation with film scholar Althea Wasow following the screening
event co-sponsored by Porter College
STRANGE MATH (WORKSHOP WITH EPHRAIM ASILI)
Wednesday February 1, 3:00pm-6:00pm, Communications 113
RSVP to ilusztig@ucsc.edu to join
Artist and Filmmaker Ephraim Asili will discuss his trajectory as an artist along with a presentation of short films including his most recent work, Strange Math, a work commissioned by Louis Vuitton.
Ephraim Asili is an African American artist, filmmaker, DJ, and traveler whose work focuses on the African diaspora as a cultural force. His childhood and adolescence were imbued with hip-hop music, Hollywood movies, and television. Often inspired by his day-to-day wanderings, Asili creates art that situates itself as a series of meditations of the everyday. He received his BA in film and media arts from Temple University and his MFA in film and interdisciplinary art at Bard College. Asili is currently the director of the Film and Electronic Arts Program at Bard College, where he is also an associate professor teaching film production and film studies.
Asili’s films have screened in festivals and venues all over the world, including the New York Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, the Berlinale, and the International Film Festival Rotterdam. Asili’s feature debut, The Inheritance, premiered at the 2020 Toronto International Film Festival. The Inheritance was recently acquired by the Whitney Museum of American Art for its permanent collection and is currently in distribution with Grasshopper Films. In 2020, Asili was named as one of “25 New Faces of Independent Film” by Filmmaker magazine. In 2021, Asili was a 2021 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation recipient. Most recently, Asili directed the short film, Strange Math, and a live fashion show at the Louvre for Louis Vuitton.
Althea Wasow is President’s Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute of the Arts and Sciences at UC Santa Cruz. Her current book project, “Moving Images/Modern Policing: Silent Cinema and Its Afterlives,” analyzes the complicity and resistance between police power and motion pictures in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Her research interests include silent film and precinematic visual culture, black studies, comparative ethnic studies, and critical carceral studies. She obtained her PhD in Film & Media with a Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory at UC Berkeley and her MFA at Columbia University.