Avis des critiques

Asili experiments with cinematic form as he considers “inheritance” as legacy, heritage, and tradition, resulting in an engrossing, challenging film that allures and confronts you in equal measure.

As a portrait of activists deep in the struggle for liberation, The Inheritance is a politically urgent and entertaining film that sees the humanity at the heart of the continuous fight for freedom.

With energy and wit, he [Asili] achieves his goal of creating "a critique and an homage at the same time," but you don't need to be familiar with the earlier work to appreciate The Inheritance. It stands solidly on its own as a dynamic inquiry into revolutionary culture and Black identity, not to mention the challenge of living with roommates.

Brainy, mannered, dryly amused, “The Inheritance” can appear willfully inexpert; the self-conscious acting feels both deliberate and the work of a director who hasn’t spent much time working with actors. But Asili dives confidently into big ideas — ideas as ideology, as wondrous inspiration, as both.

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. It is, in all ways, a reminder that any radical future must trust in the transformative potential of the communion between past and present.

“The Inheritance,” Ephraim Asili’s debut feature film, beautifully abandons genre to consider questions about community, art and Black liberation.

Asili knows the most profound gift any of us can give is our labor, both mental and physical... Unquestionably one of this year’s great films, The Inheritance seeks to position them both on equal planes of historical and individual experience, one invariably informing the other.

A playful film with a political backbone, The Inheritance is a rare work that makes present the myriad histories of Black liberatory struggle while energizing new possibilities for collectivity.

The Inheritance's freewheeling form owes a great deal to Godard, right down to the brightly colored walls, editing and the constant, exaggerated noise of a 16mm camera rolling. Asili doesn't try to hide his influence by putting a giant poster of La Chinoise as a centerpiece on the living room wall. His intention was to make a hip-hop/reggae version of Godard's agitprop classic.

Asili doesn’t treat the fiction and nonfiction pieces of The Inheritance as separate units that need to be hybridized. In fact, his most Godardian impulse is to assert that they exist on the same artistic continuum. He juxtaposes them like they’re one and the same, canopied under a painfully overlooked side of history and integrated into an inclusive framework.

The Inheritance’s channeling of the radical cinematic modernism of the ‘60s might be seen as a kind of back-to-basics approach... The attempt here to return to this moment can sometimes feel more like looking backward than pushing forward. Nonetheless, Asili’s examination of the legacy of black activism and culture in Philadelphia proves that didactic staging and unexpected cuts retain some of their power to challenge our habits of watching—and thinking.

The movie, in black-and-white, blends its mournful tones and its dramatic energies with a romantic ardor and a historic grandeur.