Now Showing at the Detroit Film Theatre: “Stray” and “The Inheritance”
While the documentary “Stray” follows three homeless dogs overseas, “The Inheritance” tells the story of a Black art movement in Philadelphia. Both are showing at the Detroit Film Theatre virtually.
CultureShift on 101.9 WDET-FM gives you a front row seat to the latest films playing at the Detroit Film Theatre (DFT).
Since 1974, DFT director Elliot Wilhelm has curated the films shown in this historic theater inside the Detroit Institute of Arts. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the DFT has continued to bring contemporary and classic world cinema from around the globe to patrons virtually via their website.
Wilhelm spoke with CultureShift’s Ryan Patrick Hooper about two films currently screening at the DFT — “Stray” and “The Inheritance,” which just got a rave review in The New York Times.
Now Showing: “Stray”
Following three homeless dogs as they embark on inconspicuous journeys through Turkish society, “Stray” explores what it means to live as a thinking, feeling being without status or security. Zeytin, fiercely independent, embarks on adventures through Istanbul at night; Nazar, nurturing and protective, easily befriends the humans around her; Kartal, a shy puppy living on the outskirts of a construction site, finds companions in the security guards who care for her.
The strays’ disparate lives intersect when they each form intimate bonds with a group of young Syrians with whom they share the streets as their home. Director Elizabeth Lo’s award-winning and unforgettable film is a critical observation of human civilization through the unfamiliar gaze of dogs and a sensory voyage into new ways of seeing the world around us.
You can stream the documentary “Stray” via the Detroit Film Theatre now through April 2.
Now Showing: “The Inheritance”
After nearly a decade exploring different facets of the African diaspora — and his own place within it — Ephraim Asili makes his feature-length debut with “The Inheritance,” an extraordinary ensemble work set almost entirely within a West Philadelphia house where a community of young, Black artists and activists form a collective.
A scripted drama of characters attempting to work toward political consensus — based partly on Asili’s own experiences in a Black liberationist group — is interwoven with a documentary recollection of the Philadelphia liberation group MOVE, the target of a notorious and deadly police bombing in 1985. Boldly finding commonalities between politics, humor, philosophy and poetry, with Black authors and radicals at its edges, “The Inheritance” – influenced stylistically, politically and visually by the pioneering New Wave films of Jean-Luc Godard — is a remarkable, boundary-stretching film about the world as we know it.
You can stream the film “The Inheritance” via the Detroit Film Theatre now through April 9.
Web story written by Elliot Wilhelm
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