I’ve been trying to keep up a pace here, but it is taking me longer than I expected to put some thoughts together about Kahlil Joseph’s 2025 film, BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions. When David Naimon, who hosts Between The Covers, had asked me about it on Bluesky, I thought I knew all I needed from the original 2018 video installation, and from the post-production and distribution wrangling that swirled around its adaptation into a feature film.
But BLKNWS the film is both recognizable, and also totally new. It is what it began as: a non-linear edit of the people, events, and ideas that constitute Black history, culture, and experience in the thin form of a cable news channel. And it has become something else entirely: encyclopedic and personal, autobiographical and universal, historic and prophetic. Joseph and his producer Onye Anyanwu opened BLKNWS up to collaboration—Naimon’s initial teaser was about the spectacular list of contributors and cameos—and they opened the film’s structure, or rather, took on a structure—the spiral—that opens, loops, and expands.
Maybe the logical thing to do is to follow their lead, and spiral, just blog about BLKNWS from now on, and take occasional note of how it turns and returns periodically to the compass points marked here before.
[next morning continuation]
BLKNWS is easy enough to describe, but better to experience. An opening title calls it an album, and the directing work of multiple collaborators are called tracks, stable on their own, integral to a whole. One track tracing the Encyclopedia Africana from W.E.B. Du Bois’ dream to the 1999 edition Joseph’s father gave him and his brother, the artist Noah Davis, simultaneously grounds the film in the entirety of humanity, the production of knowledge and culture, and the individual experience of art and family. Black historical, political, and cultural fixtures are annotated with their Africana page number—or noted for their exclusion.
Another track follows investigative journalists, one in and out of Ghana, one reporting on a Trans-Atlantic Biennial staged aboard an Afrofuturist cruise line that offers regular roundtrip transport between the Western Hemisphere and Western Africa, along the routes of the Middle Passage. Joseph split directing of these narrative tracks with Raven Jackson. There’s the burgeoning post-colonial independence of African nations, the legacy of Marcus Garvey, the exile of Du Bois. There’s a Land Art curator talking about a work of Ocean Art, who is named after Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti, “Founding Mother of Nigeria” and the great aunt of Wole Soyinka, who may or may not have liberated the Benin Mask from the British Museum. Or maybe it was a replica.
This ambiguity underscores a recurring motif of the film that might feel like fiction or fantasy, or alternate histories or universes, but which might be the future. As in, “Can you remember the future?” a question that recurs in the film, which Joseph and screenwriter Madebo Fatunde credited at Film at Lincoln Center to collaborator Saidiya Hartman. So when a journalist character talks about covering the “decrowning of the British royal family,” that is not an alternate timeline, or a fantasy, but something that has simply not happened [checks calendar, April 18th] yet.
And yet the film is inevitably also rooted in this, the moment of its creation. Garvey and Du Bois are there, but the voices gathered are those of the most influential Black scholars, thinkers, curators, and artists of the 21st century: Hartman, Dionne Brand, Christina Sharpe, Fred Moten, Okwui Enwezor, Cameron Roland, Ja’Tovia Gary, Arthur Jafa—Noah Davis. There’s an aching elegiac track in BLKNWS, which Joseph says was born in The Underground Museum, the revolutionary non-institution Davis founded with his wife Karon. There are gatherings and cameos, and stories. And the chasm left in the lives of the people making this film as they make it—in her review of a traveling Davis retrospective, Aruna D’Souza mourned the closing of The Underground Museum in 2022, crumbling “under the weight of the family’s grief.”
There are clips of Enwezor talking in 2015, the year he curated the Venice Biennale (and the year of Davis’s death at 32). And the year before Joseph urged his friend Arthur Jafa not to just put his edited video on YouTube, but to let him screen it at an Art Basel afterparty. The rest is Love Is The Message, The Message Is Death history. I thought I recognized Jafa in the interludes of juxtaposed images on a white background, specifically the extraordinary scrapbooks he showed at Made in LA in 2016. When I rewatched on a big screen, I realized it was a tumblr.
The earliest posts in 018-blknws‘ archive date to March 2017, six weeks into the Trump administration, and three weeks after the opening of Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther. [Joseph and Coogler came up with the idea of BLKNWS before Creed was released.] Joseph showed BLKNWS at Venice in 2019, where Jafa showed The White Album, the same the year Joseph watched Hartman and Moten speaking at Duke in 2016, the year Cameron Rowland put his Lloyd’s insurance-related works on view at Artists Space.
On April 15, 2024, Transatlantic Biennial curator Funmilayo Akechukwu spoke about Resonance Field (2015) at Stanford. In between my viewings of BLKNWS, I tried to locate a recording of her talk, to find only that she was going to start a collaboration with Glenstone “in the fall.” Then I realized the footage from the lecture is in the film. In November 2025 Joseph, Fatunde, and Kaneza Schaal—who directed a track and performed as Akechukwu, who, btw, was the reincarnation of Du Bois, who she also played—spoke with delight of this fabrication and fabulation that broke containment into the “real” academic world. “I’ve always wanted to create the future I want to see instead of the reality I understand,” Joseph said.
This came after BLKNWS was shown as an installation at Sundance and in five venues of Made in LA in 2020, and after the original 2022 announcement of a feature adaptation with A24 and Participant [who bailed and were bought out, respectively.] Joseph has cited Charles Burnett as an influence, along with Apichatpong Weerasethakul, but I think BLKNWS in particular resonates with Jafa’s work, and then both of them carry the echoes of Ben Campbell’s work with KAOS Networks. I want to say they echo with Campbell’s 1977 short, I & I: An African Allegory, which Carolina Miranda raved about when it was shown last month at Art + Practice, but I haven’t seen it for myself.
In a post-screening group crit by Jupiter Magazine last November, Ireon Roach described Joseph’s use of “form to show that we are always building a tapestry that looks something like this, and this film can be made again and again and again, by all of us, like, interacting with those bits before they become the encyclopedia.” My sense is that Joseph is supplanting the encyclopedia itself, and, for that matter, the film. BLKNWS feels like an incredible, vital community of artists and scholars and organizers realizing the future they want to remember, only it’s happening right now.
In a 2025 Indiewire interview about the making of the film, Joseph describes cold-calling Steven Soderbergh for advice on the ending, and having it save the entire film. I cannot imagine, and now I have to watch it again.