Adapted from Kahlil Joseph’s renowned video art installation, BLKNWS: TERMS & CONDITIONS is a distinctive cinematic experience that mirrors the sonic textures of a record album, weaving fiction and history in an immersive journey where the fictionalized figures of W. E. B. Du Bois and Marcus Garvey join artists, musicians, Joseph’s family, and even Twitter chats, in a vision for black consciousness.
Director’s Statement:
BLKNWS: TERMS & CONDITIONS is a film conceived with the fluidity and creativity of an album. This approach allowed me to think beyond traditional boundaries, embracing a process that seamlessly incorporates the contributions of other directors, artists, and collaborators. Poets, writers, editors, designers, musicians, scholars, and more have all left their mark on this project, enriching its texture and expanding its scope.
The film draws inspiration from a range of cultural and artistic touchstones: BLKNWS itself, the improvisational brilliance of Kind of Blue, the late works of Jean-Luc Godard, and the critical fabulations of Said-iya Hartman. It is shaped by conversations with Fred Moten, David Hammons, and Malik Sayeed, as well as the grounding influence of Cristina Sharpe, Dionne Brand, and the spiritual traditions of Ifá and West African cosmologies. At its heart is a profound belief in myself, my voice, and the love of my family and ancestors.
BLKNWS: TERMS & CONDITIONS brings together every format of the moving image I’ve engaged with — cinema, video art, music video, social media, and documentary. It is a layered, multi-dimensional exploration of what the moving image can achieve, both as an artistic medium and as a tool for cultural critique.
“Director Kahlil Joseph radically reimagines the world through a Black lens, while self-reflexively observing the difficulties of doing so. The film is a pulsing, essayistic docu-fiction piece that defies categorization…. It requires active, attentive viewing to catch all its rapid-fire references, but its tapestry is also hypnotic enough to be overwhelming, should you prefer to lean back and let it wash over you.” —Siddhant Adlakha, Variety “By fashioning a kinetic work that pulls together references and sources from Black literature, music, politics, and meme culture, BLKNWS: TERMS & CONDITIONS stands as a seismic intellectual awakening…. Joseph’s intent with BLKNWS was to use the news medium to create an imagined broadcast that retooled the inherent dehumanization of news reporting on Black life into a celebration of it.” —Robert Daniels, rogerebert.com “Hopeful, expansive and generously welcoming. It’s an excitingly dense, complicated compilation overflowing with heady ideas and great thinkers…. A movie that asks more than it can ever answer. I don’t think for a second that Joseph is interested in answering questions, one reason that BLKNWS can feel like an invitation. He wants to open your mind and maybe blow it (he succeeds on both counts).” —Manohla Dargis, NYT Critic’s Pick, New York Times
