BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions

The opening shot of the cover of Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African-American Experience is, like many things in this film, at once a declaration of principles and a red herring. The first feature by artist and music video director Kahlil Joseph is no mere accumulation of facts, but rather an encyclopedia of Black imagination. Wildly combining a futuristic ship which inverts the transatlantic slave trade with biographic takes on W.E.B. Du Bois and Marcus Garvey; elements of autofiction with a deliberately profane grasp of film history; and computer-generated imagery with amateur works by anonymous creators, BLKNWS: TERMS & CONDITIONS assembles a sonic and visual machine inspired by a long lineage of thinkers. Despite being explicitly based on the works of contemporary intellectuals such as Fred Moten, Arthur Jafa, Christina Sharpe and Saidiya Hartman (with the latter two both credited as co-writers), it hardly feels academic. The freshness of the material, the musicality of the editing and the restless rhythm deftly translate the “everyday anarchy” of Black experience into cinematic terms, as Hartman proposes. By “drifting between categories”, as one character says, the film dances its way out of convention. (Victor Guimarães)

Kahlil Joseph (selection): BELHAVEN MERIDIAN (2010, K), THE MIRROR BETWEEN US (2012, K), THE REFLEKTOR TAPES (2015), FLYPAPER (2018, K), CIRCUS MAXIMUS (2023, CO-DIRECTOR)