Co-Presented with Amherst Cinema's Bellwether Film Series,

Watch the film until 11:59 PM here! As long as you start the film by then, you'll be able to finish watching!

If you missed the live Q&A with Director Ephraim Asili, Bellwether Series Co-Curator George Myers and Curator Abby Sun, watch it here!

The Inheritance holds the power of a seance and the energy of a block party, unfolding like a satisfying puzzle box in interlocking the history of the West Philadelphia liberation group MOVE, the Black Arts Movement, and scripted scenes based on filmmaker Ephraim Asili’s own experience in Black Marxist collective living. This narrative is sparked by a young man’s inheritance of his grandmother’s house, which he turns into a home for a group of young artist-activists who live earnestly through consensus-based decision making, slowly turning their living spaces into a lending library and poetry reading sessions open to the community. They invite foundational Philly-based Black Arts Movement poet-activists Sonia Sanchez and Ursula Rucker to their house, who appear as themselves in these “speculative reenactments” and, along with the actors, also break character in moving direct addresses to Asili’s camera. Archival footage of MOVE before and after the fatal bombing of Osage Avenue by police and appearances by MOVE members Debbie Africa, Mike Africa Sr., and Mike Africa Jr. further establishes a legacy of Black political and artistic innovations as a vital alternative revolutionary canon.

Asili’s critically hailed cycle of shorts, The Diaspora Suite, first established him as a revelatory filmmaker whose work collapses time and space and positions the Black American experience within a transnational diaspora. Continuing to film in Super 16mm and with a set design and structure inspired by Godard’s La Chinoise, a prescient 1967 film about the revolutionary fervor of a group of young Parisian Maoists, The Inheritance stylishly continues Asili’s attention to how shared and transformative engagement with the past continues to reverberate in the present. This film is an essential nourishment. (AS)

The Inheritance (2020)

Fluid Frontiers (short, 2017)

Kindah (short, 2016)

American Hunger (short, 2014)

Co-Presented with BARCC (Boston Area Rape Crisis Center), 

Watch the film until 11:59 PM here! As long as you start the film by then, you'll be able to finish watching!

About Night Shot:

This quietly furious and life-affirming debut from Chilean filmmaker Carolina Moscoso brilliantly carries the weight of deep personal trauma. Night Shot’s images of Moscoso’s quotidian video diaries and filmed experiments as a film student undergird a narrative of her rape from eight years ago, and the re-traumatizing and discriminatory practices of an uncaring legal system that does more to protect abusers than seek justice. These two parallel tracks diverge and converge in moving, poetic ways. It is clear that Moscoso has brilliantly found a singular, powerful way of telling her own story. She avoids the violent, domineering logics of investigations while never sanitizing the events, but also resists wallowing in salaciousness or imposing emotive catharsis. Instead, we see the raw stuff of life, celebrations of birthdays, the blossoming of new love, and, most importantly, the freedom and radical resistance of filmmaking.

The images and their diarist feel are heightened in repeated segments of Moscoso’s video experiments, which reflect on the mediating power of technology and man-made systems. It’s a deliberate comparison to the narrative threads of the aftereffects of rape, but not a deterministic or fatalistic one—out of the darkness of night vision shots, we see what is previously unseen, but differently, and more piercingly, than under daylight. When Moscoso is voiceless, she speaks to us as viewers in different ways. Along with a soundtrack (composed by Camila Moreno) comprised of Moscoso’s own vocalizations, this film reconfigures our relationship to silence, the authority of words and who is allowed to speak, and the unity of feeling. The act of watching this film is witnessing both a clarion call for the margins and a life-affirming formation of collective memory. (AS)

Night Shot/Vision Nocturna (2019)

Other series sponsors include the Tyler Family Foundation and Irving House at Harvard.

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