Director Elijah Alvarado follows Chance the Rapper’s latest video with short film ‘Inheritance’

His new film debuts Saturday at the Route 66 Film Festival in Springfield. It was shot entirely with VHS cameras.

SHARE Director Elijah Alvarado follows Chance the Rapper’s latest video with short film ‘Inheritance’
Chance the Rapper and Elijah Alvarado on the set of the “We Go High” video.

Chance the Rapper and Elijah Alvarado on the set of the “We Go High” video.

Sam Paakkonen

Like most folks who grew up scouring the aisles of video stores, Elijah Alvarado has a soft spot for VHS tapes.

Looking to tap into that sense of nostalgia, the Chicago director — best known for music videos for Chance the Rapper, Good Charlotte and others — shot his latest short film, “Inheritance,” using cameras that are relics of the bygone era.

The grainy, dulled video quality invokes a certain sentimentality for Alvarado, who remembers cassettes of skateboard videos and movies like “Mallrats” being passed around like holy grails of coolness when he was growing up in the ’90s.

“That’s what informed my whole universe and idea of what media is and what the purpose of it is,” he says in an interview at his Andersonville apartment. “I kind of wanted to reconnect with that.”

The “one-sheet” poster for “Inheritance.”

The “one-sheet” poster for “Inheritance.”

Billy Martin

The film, debuting this weekend at the Route 66 Film Festival in Springfield, frames a simple act of empathy as the conduit for an honest, if fleeting, sense of connection. After the screening, Elizabeth Wheeland, who stars as Kori, will premiere the short online on her Instagram account, which has nearly 250,000 followers.

“Inheritance” initially finds Kori hauling her late father’s belongings through Kendall County in his decades-old Mercedes-Benz. When she stops for gas, Justin Nico Flocco’s character Estefan convinces her to drive him to a nearby tow lot to retrieve his pickup truck.

While Estefan’s limited English complicates their interaction, the pair’s bond often transcends language. At one point, Estefan grabs Kori’s father’s guitar from the back seat of the Mercedes and begins plucking the strings. Later in the film, the anxieties of a ploy to free the impounded truck are quelled when Estefan simply places his hand on Kori’s. 

Shot over two days in Plano and Yorkville, “Inheritance” was the byproduct of a small cast and crew “working toward this common goal,” Alvarado says.

“It’s honestly the closest thing I’ve ever come to experiencing what religion is,” he says. “When people are working together like that, to me, that’s divine.”

A behind-the-scenes photo from the production of “Inheritance.”

A behind-the-scenes photo from the production of “Inheritance.”

Falyn Huang

Alvarado first tried filmmaking as a kid growing up in Bettendorf, Iowa, one of the Quad Cities on the Illinois-Iowa border. In high school, Alvarado met Austin Vesely, another filmmaker who became and has remained a collaborator and close friend. After first moving to Iowa City to pursue film projects, the pair eventually landed in Chicago in 2009.

Like Alvarado, Vesely gained renown for directing music videos for Chance, Vic Mensa and other Chicago hip-hop acts who were starting to gain national attention. But by the fall of 2014, the city’s rap landscape had shifted, and Alvarado was looking for a new creative challenge.

Out of the blue, Good Charlotte lead singer Joel Madden called Alvarado early one morning and offered him an opportunity. He moved to Los Angeles and started exclusively working with the pop-punk band, directing its music videos and joining in on stadium tours. 

Alvarado returned to Chicago in 2016 to be the creative producer of Vesely’s feature-length debut “Slice,” which garnered massive interest when Chance — whose real name is Chancelor Bennett — announced he’d make his big-screen debut in the film. A24, the New York production company that has emerged as an indie powerhouse, was later attached to the horror-comedy romp about a series of pizza delivery drivers being killed in a town teeming with ghosts.

“It was a humongous leap,” Alvarado says. “And we swung for the motherf---ing fences.”

Elijah Alvarado with a VHS camera that was used to shoot “Inheritance.”

Elijah Alvarado with a VHS camera that was used to shoot “Inheritance.”

Tom Schuba / Sun-Times

Since the film’s release in September 2018, “Slice” has become something of a modern cult classic. In a three-star review for the Sun-Times, critic Richard Roeper lauded its campy appeal and stellar cast, which also included Chris Parnell, Zazie Beetz and Paul Scheer.

Alvarado has since directed Chance’s recent “We Go High” video and struck up a relationship with filmmaker Joe Swanberg, a kindred spirit who tapped him and Vesely to appear in his Chicago-centric Netflix show “Easy.” Swanberg recently returned the favor, starring in a short film that Alvarado wrapped just a week ago.

“Coming up and doing creative things in Chicago, there has been a crab in a barrel mentality, but I really don’t feel that too much anymore,” Alvarado says, pointing to the collaborations. “It’s way more inclusive.”

The Latest
The Bears have spent months studying the draft. They’ll spend the next one plotting what could happen.
Woman is getting anxious about how often she has to host her husband’s hunting buddy and his wife, who don’t contribute at all to mealtimes.
He launched a campaign against a proposed neo-Nazis march at a time the suburb was home to many Holocaust survivors. His rabbi at Skokie Central Congregation urged Jews to ignore the Nazis. “I jumped up and said, ‘No, Rabbi. We will not stay home and close the windows.’ ”
That the Bears can just diesel their way in, Bronko Nagurski-style, and attempt to set a sweeping agenda for the future of one of the world’s most iconic water frontages is more than a bit troubling.