Poetry, politics and the layered history of the Black experience collide in this pulsating, kaleidoscopic essay film.

Crafting a subversive montage out of found footage, movie snippets, re-enactments, academic citations, TikTok clips and memes, filmmaker Kahlil Joseph expands his acclaimed 30-minute video-art installation BLKNWS into a sprawling and immersive feature that recalls a news program, a music album and an encyclopedia. Activists James Baldwin and Marcus Garvey, scholars Saidiya Hartman and Fred Moten, and writers Wole Soyinka and Audre Lorde share space with singer Whitney Houston, actors Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee, and comedian Eric André, offering a compilation of entries, voices and perspectives, each contributing to an intricate cultural tapestry.

BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions traverses the past, present and future of African peoples from the slave trade and colonisation through to modern pop culture and Afrofuturism, while also offering a personal meditation on the filmmaker’s troubled family. Joseph – who has previously directed music videos for Beyoncé and Kendrick Lamar – takes inspiration from W.E.B. Du Bois’s Encyclopedia Africana, employing segments, track titles and page numbers as structuring devices along with an electrifying soundtrack of techno (whose own African roots are explored). Chameleonic and intellectually curious, this heady and groundbreaking piece of cinema is a living archive – one that reclaims the Black story from the buried and biased chapters of history.

“Rich and impressionistic … a stunning mise en abyme rife with rhythm and energy – as intellectually potent as it is emotionally stimulating.” – Variety