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.
Expanding upon Joseph’s 2019 two-channel art installation, on its surface, BLKNWS takes the form of a news channel, complete with anchors, tickers, breaking-news alerts, and commercials in the form of bold title cards. Yet with its phenomenal soundtrack and immersive sound design, it plays (as the motif of a spinning record suggests) more like a compilation album whose next track you could never predict.
In charting the sprawling African diaspora, Joseph finds a through line with curator Funmilayo Akechukwu’s in-progress project The Resonance Field, imaginatively rendered in the film by cinematographer Bradford Young and through the eyes of a journalist venturing into a futuristic vessel called the Nautica to cover the Transatlantic Biennale. It’s an exhibit taking place in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, acting as a metaphor for reclaiming a passage that was used not only for the abduction of slaves but for pilfering Black art as well. Like last year’s Dahomey, the restitution of “artifacts that were long ago alienated from the communicates they were intended to serve” is a poignant thread throughout BLKNWS. More interested in feeling than context, Joseph often introduces new ideas in media res before circling back with more detail, if he so desires. The culminating effect is one of riveting disorientation. The constant stream of ideas presented––including Joseph’s own family history, how religious-backed institutions at large have inflicted pain, and the ways in which much of culture is now filtered through the prism of a crowded webpage, to name a few––is never less than thoroughly stimulating.
Perhaps best known for his contributions to Beyoncé’s era-defending Lemonade and music videos for Kendrick Lamar, FKA Twigs, and Flying Lotus, Joseph also worked behind the scenes on To the Wonder and subsequent Terrence Malick productions. The influence of that great master of poetic cinema can be felt throughout BLKNWS, and not just in the repeated use of John Tavener’s “Funeral Canticle.” For The Tree of Life, Malick instructed his team that the film should flow like a river, assembling disparate imagery to wash over the viewer in overwhelmingly lyrical power. That ethos runs through Joseph’s debut as we’re flooded with snapshots of Black culture both iconic and obscure.
There are snippets of James Baldwin, Nikki Giovanni, Whitney Houston, Marcus Garvey, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Larry Levan, Willie Mays, Audre Lorde, the Black Star Line, Katrina, and the Million Man March––much of that in just the first few minutes of the first montage. To highlight the exhaustive breadth and depth of the archival material Joseph utilizes would take an annotated making-of-compendium from the director, but what registers most is the playful approach to editing. Alien’s Xenomorph is suggested to be inspired by early African art; subtitles in Vivre sa vie are replaced with someone asking for Wu-Tang albums; pioneering Nigerian curator Okwui Enwezor discusses how the space between art and the spectator is important––cut to Eric André critiquing the modern art world as he smashes exhibitions. As much as BLKNWS is reflecting on both the joy and pain of Black history, consciously disassociating from images of violence inflicted on Black people, it’s also about tearing down antiquated structures and ideas of art and presentation to build a new path forward.
In an enlivening meta perspective, BLKNWS also becomes a documentary of its own making, showing how Joseph first had this idea after viewing a talk from Fred Moten and Saidiya Hartman in 2017 and displaying its first incarnation developed at Los Angeles’ Underground Museum. As Black art and culture advances, one imagines this feature film won’t be the last manifestation of Joseph’s magnum opus. That thrilling sense of constant reinvention is in itself a refutation of the commerce system where all art must be confined and commodified to an easily marketable and sellable piece of content.
“What is bad for cinema is categories,” notes Agnès Varda in a featured clip. Refusing to be boxed into any one form, BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions plays unclassifiable in the most stimulating of ways: a dense, boundlessly creative, and (above all) entertaining odyssey chronicling both personal and public history on an epic scale. With the draw of a great vinyl record, as soon as it ends, it deserves to be spun again. “Do you ever remember the future?” is repeatedly pondered throughout the film. In many ways, Joseph’s mesmerizing debut feels like a living, breathing dispatch from a time beyond ours, ushering in new possibilities for the form.
BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions premiered at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival.