BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions (2025 | USA | 113 minutes | Kahlil Joseph)

Kahlil Joseph’s multi-sensory film takes inspiration for W.E.B. Du Bois’s dream — unfinished at the time of his death, but realized decades later by a group of scholars led by Henry Louis Gates — of creating an Encyclopedia of the African and African-American Experience. Acting more as chief curator or executive producer than a typical film director, he assembles a richly textured visual album for the screen that includes a long list of talented filmmakers, collaborators, and guest stars. The result is both personal and prophetic, a radical reimagination of Black history as an encyclopedic mixtape.

Having made museum pieces and music videos, Joseph expands the scope of his work and compiles a vast array of visual artifacts via a very loosely structured story set in an unspecified future aboard an ocean liner whose route rewinds transatlantic slave ship passages. Along with curators, heiresses, volunteers, refugees, and an enterprising journalist, the luxury vessel plays host to a floating art biennale. This armature links actual and speculative history as a kind of intergenerational memory, interweaving Joseph’s immediate family history and immersion in the arts (told largely through onscreen captions and collage), Du Bois’s early research to his final years in Ghana (shot as a historical docudrama); a series of “news reports” from the near future timeline that spotlight contemporary Black scholarship.

Each section is distinguished with its own look and feel, beautifully designed, and never boring to look at. The sleek look of the ship pays tribute to the past while appearing convincingly futuristic; flashbacks into history are both abstract and achingly personal. Alongside the narrative pieces contemporary YouTube clips pop; slickly-produced imaginary news broadcasts draw chuckles. Impeccable editing (from Everything Everywhere All At Once Oscar-winner Paul Rogers) holds it all together, pushing forward toward a coherent whole. Music supervision (a dizzying collection of samples, classical piano, and a propulsive techno-accented original score from Klein) also does a lot of heavy lifting to make this fusion of narrative styles invigorating rather than imposing. Surrendering to the flows of this ambitious film’s inventive rhythms makes for an invigorating journey that’ll reward rewatches with a detailed tracklist of collaborator contributions close at hand.

This review originally ran when BLKNWS: Terms and Conditions plays as part of the SIFF 2025 New American Cinema competition. It returns to Seattle this weekend with weekend screenings at Northwest Film Forum.

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