While calling Kahlil Joseph’s ambitious feature BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions a documentary is perhaps underselling the overflowing nature of its ideas, it’s certainly the best film I saw at Sundance Film Festival last year. Ahead of its New York Film Festival premiere, Rich Spirit has now set a release date of November 2 and debuted the first teaser trailer.
“This work was nurtured for years as an idea, an evolving installation. To bring it into theaters now feels necessary because the theater is where images breathe differently, where the exchange with an audience transforms them. Our partnership with Rich Spirit supports that independence and ensures the release of this film honors the brilliance of all who helped create it,” Joseph and producer Onye Anyanwu said to Deadline.
I said in my Sundance review, “Celebrating and condensing centuries of Black history that would take more than a few lifetimes for any scholar to thoroughly ascertain in totality, Kahlil Joseph’s BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions eschews dryly academy ethnographic study to deliver a kaleidoscopic, vigorous, engrossing journey. Utilizing Henry Louis Gates and Anthony Appiah’s W. E. B. Du Bois-inspired “Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience”––the latest edition of which is nearly 4,000 pages––as its foundation, with page numbers presented throughout its plethora of references, the viewing experience is less daunting than one imagines the filmmaking process surely must have proved. Converging and clashing seemingly thousands of pieces of media to thought-provoking effect, this is a directorial debut that’s overwhelming in its rapid pace while also acting as a generous invitation to further examine any one of its sprawling tendrils of past, present, and future Black history.”
See the trailer below.