THE DIASPORA SUITE

To coincide with the Spanish premiere of Ephraim Asili’s never more topical The Inheritance, we are also screening his five-part series The Diaspora Suite at Filmin.es, a personal and global study of the African diaspora shot on 16mm whose explorations of the diversity of Black culture also inform his debut feature. Created over the course of seven years, each of the five shorts has a unique rhythm built around a specific amalgam of footage shot in American and international locations, all of them important sites within the African diaspora. Forged Ways (2011) travels between Harlem and Addis Ababa, Ethiopia; American Hunger (2013) features Philadelphia, Ocean City, and Cape Coast, Ghana; in Many Thousands Gone (2014), Harlem and Salvador, Brazil; in Kindah (2016), Hudson, New York, and Jamaica; and in Fluid Frontiers (2017), Detroit and Windsor, Canada. Encompassing history, politics, music, dance, poetry, and ritual, The Diaspora Suite is by turns playful, surprising, moving, and a radical interrogation of colonialism’s legacy in its construction of a one-of-a-kind, global vision of pan-African identity. (JL)