- Hello, welcome to the Toronto International Film Festival
our 45th edition
and the Q and A recording for "The Inheritance"
One of this year's 50 official selections.
My name is Andrea Picard
and I'm the Programmer of the Wavelength section
I'm delighted to be here with Ephraim Asili
the Director of "The Inheritance".
Before we begin,
I would like to thank our audience for joining us.
This is obviously an unprecedented and historic time,
and we've had to change the way we work dramatically.
As an organization heavily impacted by COVID,
we rely on the support of our audiences so that
we can continue to present films to future generations
while supporting today's filmmaking talent,
especially at this critical moment.
I'd like to remind you
that this film is eligible for the People's Choice Award.
Please vote for your favorite films at tiff.net/vote
Now just a few words about Ephraim,
for those of you who haven't encountered
his wonderful films before, Ephraim Asili is a filmmaker,
a DJ, a traveler, I say that maybe pre, post-COVID traveler.
Who's work focuses on the African diaspora
as a cultural force.
His films have screened in festivals
and venues all over the world,
including at TIFF, the New York Film Festival,
Media City, MoMA, the ICA in London among many other places.
Asili currently resides in Hudson New York,
and is a professor in
the Film and Electronic Arts Department at Bard College.
Ephraim, Welcome.
- Thank you.
- Thank you so much for being here virtually,
We would have loved to have host you,
this is such a momentous time for you.
This is your first feature film,
"The Inheritance", congratulations first of all.
- Thank you, thank you very much.
- I have to say, I mean, you're no stranger to Toronto.
You've done a residency here at Lyft.
You've shown a Wavelength's twive,
you've had a group program,
and I did also see a Blue Jays cap in your film.
I think my resonate,
but I have to say when I first saw "The Inheritance"
I was quite surprised by the narrative core of the film.
I mean, there are real actors, there's a full set,
but at the same time, the visual and sonic language
that you've developed in "The Diaspora Suite"
is very much present.
So I was wondering if you could start talking about,
one, the genesis of the project,
because it feels both an extension of your work,
but also a big leap in a way.
And if you can talk about the real dynamic structure
that you've created.
- Sure, thank you for that question.
It's interesting having made "The Diaspora Suite"
which was five films made in about six or seven years,
it was a very, for me,
fast paced in terms of how I was working.
And I would say an experimental film
that's, I would say a normal pace to keep
about a film a year.
And there's a sort of way that that ties into festivals
and other things that creates
a really nice comfortable rhythm for working.
for myself, I felt it was so comfortable the fact
that I could just perpetually try to keep doing that.
But I felt like that would come at a cost
to developing a deeper practice,
which is really important to me
that I don't really focus on only* one film that I'm making,
but I try to think of what I'm doing
as a sort of body of work made over a lifetime
and how the works relate it is very important.
And so I want that practice to be expansive.
And so I wanted to kind of take a pause and say well,
I've been doing this, this is very comfortable,
but what can I bring from this forward into something
that's even more expansive?
And so I then thought about working in a longer form,
which we often call feature, right?
And then I found myself saying, Oh, I'm making my feature.
And when you start going around saying something like that,
I think automatically people think of,
Oh, you're writing like a 90 page script
and you're gonna have actors and all that stuff.
And sure enough that's what I was doing.
However, I was also very preoccupied with how can I,
as you say, bring the visual language,
some of the structural language of "The Diaspora Suite"
into that form.
It wasn't as though I was trying to pivot away
from what I'd been doing,
what I had learned it was more about,
is the language that I've been creating for myself viable
over the course of an hour, hour and a half, two hours.
And if not, what do I need to do to enhance that?
And so that was kind of the general thinking
at the same time, if you look back into "The Diaspora Suite"
the very first film, it's very much for me split
between concerns around narrative structure,
and documentary, experimental, ethnographic,
whatever you would call it structures.
And then I moved away from it.
And so that preoccupation was always there.
When I got the go-ahead to shoot the film,
I then started to really think about
how to approach narrative
and working with actors almost in the concrete sense,
like what is it like to work with an actor,
as opposed to I have this character
that I need someone to portray.
And so I kind of tried to leave some tension there
between working with an actor almost in the material sense
in the way that say it's like a model
I mean at the same time,
working with the talents of these people we could do.
And so the script is kind of deliberately written in a way
that I'm getting into these sort of spaces
between fiction and reality,
and what does it mean to document actor acting
versus a narrative film or an actor's active acting.
- There's certainly medal levels there.
(both laugh)
But the film is based on
real life experiences, to some degree
and your time in a West Philadelphia collective.
And I'm wondering, did that overlap with the MOVE movement?
Did you interact with them at all?
- Yeah. You know, very much so the film deals with it a lot.
It's very different than what happened in real life
in some ways, but in actuality,
my activist work was in some ways inseparable from MOVE
When I moved to West Philly, my partner at the time,
and a lot of my friends, several of my friends
who were living together an apartment,
and that apartment happened to be one block away from MOVE's
And so in a very casual sense
we would interact with each other.
I was probably 20 when that started.
By the time of my 21st birthday,
I was very much learning a lot from MOVE
getting as much as I can
spending as much time with them as possible.
And from there, we were kind of in a lot of ways,
modeling ourselves after MOVE
but also bringing in beliefs from other places.
And at that same time,
most of my activist work was revolving
around doing work on behalf of the MOVE 9
who were imprisoned at the time and et cetera, and so,
in fact, when I got married to my partner at the time,
my wedding was what we called the MOVE wedding.
It was officiated even by Ramona Africa.
So it was very much like that's how we were we're living,
at the same time there were other things happening
in the community that were influences as well.
And so, like when you see the move people in the film
particularly Mike Africa jr.,
we were very close friends supporting each other
through a lot of difficult times and that sort of a thing.
And so MOVE has always been very close in that way
during that phase.
In terms of the narrative,
I wasn't so much interested in portraying that
as I wasn't kind of creating a new situation
people are learning about MOVE just seems more interesting
and kind of having it more embedded in the story
as like a fully developed belief system.
- Well, it certainly is a personal film
and you can feel that.
So it makes sense that you have relationships
with Mike Africa, for instance,
and that relationship goes way back.
But what strikes me about the film
it's impossible to allude it
as how timely and urgent the film is.
And it speaks to what we're living today.
And I thought a lot about what,
sorry, I think something popped up on my screen.
I thought a lot about what Debbie Africa,
when she was talking
about John Africa's philosophy of the natural law
and how it is we approach what we consume and how we live.
And I think the pandemic has made people rethink
the ways in which they live their lives,
moving away from the city, eating locally,
but also about technology and how it impedes, caring,
and the idea of caring for things that don't care.
So I think there's that level,
but then obviously dealing with the ongoing
systemic police brutality in America
and beyond against black people,
indigenous people, people of color.
And I think that the mirroring that's happening
between his work and what's happening today
is so front and center.
I'm wondering if you can talk about the sort of slippages
between your imagination,
what you're writing, the power of your activism,
and what you're living today.
- Sure, yeah great question.
It's really interesting the way that the film
or the timing of the film in that,
it was conceived of,
on this day I sat down to start writing
during the summer of 2016.
Yeah I sat down and started writing then.
And so, you know and then it developed over time,
we finished shooting over a year ago.
And so the photography was done June of 2019.
And so there's nothing in there that actually,
obviously COVID hadn't happened then.
And this is obviously pre-George Floyd.
And so, those things hadn't happened.
Nonetheless, as you say,
John Africa was speaking on these types of issues,
going back to the 70s.
And so for me as an activist,
one of the films that I admired even in my early 20s
was "The Spook Who Sat by the Door",
which was written by Sam Greenlee.
And when you look at what Greenlee was doing,
when he speaks in interviews he was saying,
"Well, I was actually working for the government in Iraq."
I believe he was in Baghdad.
And he was seeing how the sort of neo-colonial forces
were moving and how it reminded him of domestic politics.
And seeing the Watts Uprising
was a cathartic moment for him
and inspired him to write the book.
And then when the film comes out,
however many years later,
it still is timely as it was written.
And I think that happens
because if one is able to pinpoint
the underlying causes of these things
and address them in some way,
so long as those underlying causes are there,
the issues are relevant.
I mean I think the work of the filmmaker
or the artist is to kind of find a way to communicate
or to illustrate some of those underlying forces,
but at the same time to do it in a way
that opens up discussion or as enables people
to kind of explore the issues for themselves,
as opposed to being told what to do.
And so kind of approaching the work,
wanting to examine certain forces at play in the world,
that's going on in the work.
And then it just coincidentally,
these awful things start happening
that bring that to the surface for everyone.
And so, there was an interesting moment
when we were shooting the film
where I had a meeting with my actors,
we were shooting big meeting sequence
and we, shooting on film
so we have very limited time, very few takes,
and we'd done one take of the scene
and it felt like people were having a meeting
in a sort of casual way.
And for me, there was an urgency
that I really wanted in the scene that wasn't there.
And I remember we went off to the side
and now they ask, "well, what is the urgency?"
And I was a little bit surprised, but then you realize,
well, not everyone is operating in your frame of mind
about what we're dealing with.
But I often think about if we were shooting
that film this summer, I don't think anyone would ask
what the sense of urgency was.
But at the time I think it was beneficial
for the film in that again,
I think we're now kind of catching up to the politics
that the film was interested in back then,
which was also happening in my activist work,
at the time of, how do I say it?
During the wind of time where the film takes place.
So in my early 20s, I felt as though my activism
had kind of hit a wall in terms of what I could do
as an activist in terms of my skills.
And at the same time,
I really felt as though there was a lack of general interest
in those sort of things we were interested in,
prison reform, police brutality, eating right, et cetera.
It kind of fell out of, the general psyche, I would say,
And then suddenly, Trump gets in there
and all of these things become pressing issues again.
And so there's a sort of ebb and flow of the politics.
And so, we're catching that sort of flow moment right now.
And the film just happens to be made at that moment,
but that's a strange happening
- There's so much to unpack in this film
and unfortunately we don't have the time to do so,
but when you mentioned Trump, that clip of Shirley Chisholm,
which is incredible when she talks
about running on integrity and principle,
otherwise it's ego tripping
immediately, I was like, this is Trump,
(Andrea chuckles)
- Yeah.
- Yeah, I wish we could continue the conversation.
I wanna end on the title of "The Inheritance",
which is this double meaning,
obviously the protagonist inherits his grandmother's house
and turns it into the house of a Ubuntu
But the heritage of "The Inheritance"
is also this cultural legacy and legacy of resistance.
And I think this has mimicked really interestingly
in your camera work and how it flows back and forth,
and puts us the audience in this POV of direct address
where we are all students.
And I'm wondering if you could end on that.
- Absolutely, filmmaking means a lot of different things
to a lot of different people
and, people do what they want with it.
But for me, it's very much a vehicle for myself
to, well I'll use the term you used earlier
for me to mirror my thoughts.
So I could actually get them out of my head
and literally look at them in a sense.
And I really work to kind of keep my films
in the space of their thoughts,
their ideas, not totally formulated.
And so in addressing an audience in that way,
I'm also kind of addressing myself almost
as if I'm writing an essay to kind of flush out my ideas.
And so, it's made it for me in a way
that these are the things that are on my mind,
I want to explore them, I want to share them in the same way
that these characters are sharing with each other.
And so always, like you're saying,
trying to work on these levels, these sort of,
level of "The Inheritance" as the sky and everything else,
but also what are we inheriting?
As so many of the activists we admire are passing
or getting older, what are we inheriting there?
But rather than keeping that
as a sort of direct question in a documentary sense,
how do you actually build a visual auditory language
that asks that question of all of us
and that we're able hopefully to collectively come up
with some solutions of how we can move forward.
I'll just end saying, I think,
today is actually the anniversary of Martin Luther King's
"March in Washington lab I have a dream" speech
and, wonderful anniversary
and we're living through this time of Black Lives Matter,
but something that I find deeply concerning
that I really hope the film addresses
is I really would like us to have a wider platform.
And that, I think we've gotten into a place
of very specific politics and issues,
but I don't know that we can go any further
unless we actually have a wider platform.
So to end on what you're saying about Chisholm
it is about kind of maybe less ego tripping
and more coalition building.
And so that's again kind of embedded,
hopefully in the form of the film.
As opposed to just making a political film,
making film politically, as Joel G says.
- And one feels that optimism too.
And I have to thank you for those performances,
for those readings by Sonia Sanchez and Ursula Rucker,
because they're so beautiful, they're so moving.
And it also speaks to the power of testimony
and how we have to listen
and be active and engaged.
Ephraim, thank you so much for this amazing film.
I hope to see you in person sometime soon,
I'm going to pay attention to all of the interviews
that you're giving.
This dialogue is going to continue far and wide.
Thank you so much.
- Thank you, and thanks for spreading the word.
Yeah, it's really a pleasure, amazing.