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.

BLKNWS: Terms and Conditions plays as part of SIFF’s New American Cinema competition. It has its second screening MONDAY, MAY 19 at SIFF Cinema Uptown at 4:00 PM with Director Kahlil Joseph scheduled to attend.

The Safe House (2025 | Switzerland,Luxembourg,France | 90 minutes | Lionel Baier)

As above, levels of metatextuality and history permeate The Safe House (La Cache). A self-aware narrator tells us that the film is inspired by a novel that was inspired by the childhood memories of the author, Christophe Boitanski, who related his family’s life by describing the rooms in their apartment on Rue de Grenelle in Paris. The narrator frequently interjects; the filmmaking occasionally gestures to the artifice of storytelling. Everything looks fantastic, color-coordinated, and framed perfectly.

We enter the story on May 3 of 1968 via a young version of this author, here a doughy, mop-haired, precocious nine-year-old boy left in the custody of his grandparents. He’ll be there for weeks while his own parents come and go, but are mostly absent as they participate in the growing student protests for a general strike that will soon rise to take over the city and change the course of the nation. Seemingly used to being left to his own devices, the kid doesn’t seem to mind, but the apartment complex’s rules and snobby neighbors are kind of a drag. 

The apartment itself is overstuffed with people and expertly curated family artifacts that consume every available space. A great-grandmother who immigrated (or rather, took refuge) from Odessa (“the Hinterlands”) at the turn of the century holds court in the attic, spinning classical records on her phonograph, reflecting on a past life among Eastern European artistes, and dispensing tales of her old life whenever the child will listen. Two adult uncles — one an academic, the other an artist — seem never to have left the nest, huddling together in their parents’ rooms to take charcuterie-style dinners while watching the television. The grandmother, proud, stylish, and concealing a limp leg, demands to be referred to as the child’s aunt when ferrying the family about town in their stylish car whose maroon paint matches its passengers’ sweaters. Trim, confident, and empathetic, she spends her off-hours interviewing the underrepresented for her own audio archives. Grandfather still practices medicine, tending to a quirky array of complaints. Advancement to the Academy is a dream too big. 

They occasionally participate in flyering in support of the protest and host political discussions, but their extreme insularity keeps most of the growing turbulence of smoke and gunfire safely outside the heavy wooden doors of their shared courtyard. Huddled within, exceptional art direction sets the characters as pieces of an intricate interconnected scrapbook whose meanings gradually unfurl. The look is a French Tenenbaums, but the characterization and humor are deeply muted. Toward the end, an incongruous visitor arrives. His presence is a catalyst to unlock several big explanatory revelations, but the incongruity of it reads as magic realism. It’s so jarring that it drains impact from what we learn about the family’s history. Despite a lot of fascinating pieces, gestures at postmodern style, and taking place at a fascinating time in history, the lavish puzzle pieces never quite come together effectively enough to elevate above the twee premise.

The Safe House plays as part of SIFF’s Official Competition with upcoming screenings:
WEDNESDAY, MAY 21 – SIFF Cinema Uptown – 6:30 PM
THURSDAY, MAY 22 – Shoreline Community College
6:00 PM

The Librarians (2025 | USA | 88 minutes | Kim A. Snyder)

The Librarians played SIFF as part of the Documentary Competition. No additional festival screenings are scheduled, but after an autumn theatrical release, the film is slated to appear on PBS’s Independent Lens on PBS early next year