INT. Morning: We See
A Character Develop

The records sit in another box, elevated by an orange stool, to the right of a turntable. Asili’s camera meditates on them individually throughout the film: Socialism And The American Negro, a recording of W.E.B. DuBois speaking to the Wisconsin Socialism Club in 1960s Madison, Free Huey, Kwame Ture’s 1968 speech demanding the release of the imprisoned Black Panther Party founder, What If I Am A Woman?, speeches by Black women narrated by the actress Ruby Dee, We Insist!, Max Roach’s 1960s jazz album, and more.

These works, and the West Philadelphia rowhouse in which Julian finds them, were left to him by his recently deceased grandmother. They are part of his inheritance—minor and major, personal and political. Asili’s debut feature, which was released in March of 2021, is about what Julian does with these gifts. Inspired by La Chinoise, Jean-Luc Godard’s dark comedy about young Maoists living in Paris, and Asili’s own life, The Inheritance tells an impressionistic tale of a young man trying to form a Black radical collective with his friends. It’s primarily a study of the mundane parts of communal living—the unsexy conversations, awkward dynamics and tensions that occur alongside moments of real joy and revelation. But it’s also about how community—a composition of archival material, a loose assortment of people, the way a home takes shape—can invite change and encourage growth.

The first person Julian asks to move in is Gwen, his girlfriend-not-girlfriend played with admirable candor by Nozipho Mclean. The proposal initially comes off as a joke. “Listen, the last time I saw you was like a month ago,” Gwen reminds Julian when he makes his invitation. “We haven’t been in communication lately, and for all you know I could be seeing someone.” Despite his revolutionary predilections, Julian is still a dumb boy. Gwen, nonetheless, agrees.

The collective, which they call Ubuntu House, comes together in pieces. Old Head, a neighborhood fixture who has been helping Julian refurbish his grandmother’s home, becomes a member soon after Gwen. We first meet him, played by Julian Rozzell Jr., smoothly coating the edge of a kitchen window with buttercream white paint. Other members like Gwen’s friend Stephanie (Aniya Picou), soft-spoken Janet (Aurielle Akerele), trumpet-tooting Jamel (Timothy Trumpet Jr.) and Patricia (Nyabel Lual), who spearheads a language class for the collective, join soon after.

As the collective grows—time is loose in the film—the house changes too. Furniture accumulates: a dining table appears where there was once just a photograph of Shirley Chisholm. Here, the members sit to decide on whether shoes will be allowed in the house (obvious answer: no), to figure out a cleaning schedule—you know, the small negotiations that go into making a home. The living area doubles as a classroom, where they can teach each other new skills (Patricia’s language lessons, for example), play music, (there is a drum kit in the corner) and hear from elders (like the members of the MOVE collective, whose story Asili recounts through archival footage).

Unable to afford to shoot in an actual West Philadelphia rowhouse, the filmmaker took up an offer from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute's Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center and shot the film in its studio in Troy, New York. As with a “real” home, Asili planned and schemed, tinkered and assembled, in order to create a space suited for its inhabitants. “Once I accepted the conditions of studio filmmaking, the black box became my blank canvas and I built the set design color by color, object by object,” Asili told Artforum in September 2020. “Every book, poster, painting, piece of fabric and furniture was handpicked.” The house and its interior design, to the audience, becomes an archival bridge, connecting past and present conversations.

It wasn’t until I watched The Inheritance for a second and third time that I began to really see these patterns—the kente and ankara, fabrics popular throughout the Black diaspora; the Ebony magazines dotting the walls and strewn across the tables; the posters and art pieces hanging throughout the home. They add texture to Asili’s story, reinforcing the influences that brought the Ubuntu members together. But they also feel like invitations, like so many films are, to revel in what I recognized and dig into what I didn’t. I saw the books Julian selected from the chest at the beginning of the film as an establishment of the collective’s ideological concerns, a way to link their forthcoming conversations and even actions with earlier generations of Black intellectuals. What does it mean to work through ideological differences within a community? To honor the experiences of everyone in the group? To not condescend? To understand that the goal is compassion, even if you don’t meet that standard every day?

In the kitchen, a kente-style cloth is used as a makeshift curtain. Its bright red, yellow and teal patterns complement the canary yellow walls of the room where members brew coffee and blend produce for green juices. It affirms the family’s diasporic connection and brings to mind stories my own mother tells about the cloth’s history. The legend begins in Bonwire, a town east of Kumasi, Ghana and the kente (derived from the Twi word for basket) capital. Two brothers from this city were enchanted by the web of Ananse, that mythical clever spider, and it’s said that they studied his web designs and mimicked them. Kente has always been a royal cloth, specially commissioned by and for the elite members of the Ashanti kingdom, but in recent decades its style has been remixed, exported, and adopted.When Asili’s camera pans across the living area, I recognize the quilted ankara fabric, also known as Dutch wax print, draped over a couch. These colorful and strikingly patterned cotton sheets were stuffed in closets and dressers all over my house growing up. My mother, a seamstress in her younger days, would haul them from trips to Ghana, and, when the mood struck her, tailor them to her taste: a simple shirt, a mermaid gown or even a peplum skirt with multi-dimensional appliqués.

Then there are the Ebony magazines. The publication, which was founded in 1949 by John H. Johnson, initially struck me as a curious addition in the house of radical Black Marxists (its most ardent detractor, the sociologist E. Franklin Fraizer, accused it of caring more about bourgeois aesthetics and wealth instead of truth), but it speaks to the legacy of image making. While it seemed committed to documenting celebrity lifestyles and African-American excellence, the magazine, as scholars like Adam Green and Brenna Wynn Greer have written about, also played a role in the formation of African-American identity. Living alongside these journals and fabrics are other artifacts and Black ephemera — a poster of The Spook Who Sat By the Door, a 1973 film based on the novel of the same name by Chicago writer Sam Greenlee, or Faith Ringgold’s 1970 revolutionary poster All Power to the People, an image of a family rendered in the red, green and black colors of liberation.

But an abundance of symbols doesn’t replace the labor of realizing the collective’s ideals. Although Ubuntu House aims for a flat structure, it feels driven by Gwen and Julian’s ways of seeing. They are young, doe-eyed and rigid; they struggle, at times, to understand the perspectives and motivations of others. A heated exchange ends with Old Head storming out of a conversation. “This ain’t no joke,” Old Head says as he leaves. “Y’all need to grow up.”

How to grow up, and in which direction, is the undercurrent of The Inheritance. It’s by communing with others—wrestling through divergent needs, coming to consensus, listening, revising the vision accordingly—that one grows. During one scene about an event staged by the collective, with performances from members of the collective and artists from Philadelphia, Asili’s camera pans out, revealing more of the den—the new chairs, a huge quilt that serves as a backdrop to the stage. The space has, in effect, grown out.

Implicit in this message of growth is another more gnarled one of change. After their neighbors have left the gathering and the other members have dispersed, Julian stands in his grandmother’s living room alone, surrounded by artifacts of the past and enveloped by remnants of his present. Shrouded in darkness, he sighs as he—with a surprising pragmatism—sweeps the hardwood floors, restores a sculpture to its proper place on the bookshelf and moves the drum kit back to the corner. Suddenly these inherited artifacts assume an additional meaning—they are not just objects of Asili’s precise curatorial eye, but props symbolic of Julian’s fitful character. Has the collective failed or succeeded? Was it a good idea or a bad one? Asili seems to suggest that regardless of the answers to these questions, Julian stands changed—perhaps even grown up.

Lovia Gyarkye is a writer based in New York.