This Black History Month, get a sneak peek into a film-in-progress by Philadelphia native Ephraim Asili exploring the shared artistic, political, and spiritual worlds that shaped the work of multi-instrumentalist Don Cherry and his collaborator and wife, the artist Moki Cherry.

Brought together on Moki’s birthday, Asili joins Scribe Video Center founder Louis Massiah for a conversation anchored in Asili’s ongoing work, Don & Moki: Organic Music Society. This feature-length 16mm documentary/essay film draws from rare archival materials, filmed performances, and newly shot footage and interviews with the couple’s many collaborators. An excerpt from this work is currently on view in The Living Temple: The World of Moki Cherry.

Together, they will reflect on filmmaking as a mode of research, listening, and collective memory, and on the challenges of translating improvisational, interdisciplinary practices to the screen.

Ephraim Asili is an artist whose work focuses on the African diaspora as a cultural force. Often inspired by his quotidian wanderings, Asili creates art that situates itself as a series of meditations on the everyday. Asili’s films have screened in festivals and venues all over the world, including the New York Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, The Berlinale, and the International Film Festival Rotterdam. Asili’s 2020 feature debut The Inheritance premiered at the 2020 Toronto International Film Festival, and was the focus of a 2023 exhibition at  the Whitney Museum of American Art where it is a part of their permanent collection.

Louis Massiah is a documentary filmmaker and the founder of the Scribe Video Center in Philadelphia, a media arts center that provides production workshops to community groups and emerging media makers. As an educator and institution builder, Massiah has developed production methodologies that assist first time makers author their own stories, including the Precious Places Community History project, a collection of 150 collaborative documentaries; Muslim Voices of Philadelphia; The Great Migration: A City Transformed (1916-1930); and The Tenants of Lenapehocking in the Age of Magnets, an oral history project. Massiah received a B.A. (1977) from Cornell University and an M.S. (1982) from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. A MacArthur Foundation “genius award” Fellow, he is currently an A.D. White Visiting Professor at Cornell University.