Kahlil Joseph’s BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions operates at the intersection of documentary, visual essay, and speculative fiction. Refusing easy categorization, the film takes W.E.B. Du Bois’s unfinished Encyclopedia Africana as its foundation and translates the encyclopedic project of Black peoplehood into the grammar of the visual — cut, refrain, archive, the Nautica’s transatlantic passage, the slow-motion clearings opened inside the relentless news cycle. Part Afrofuturist cinema, part Black media theory, part sonic essay, the film reimagines the news broadcast as a counter-archive.

Joseph constructs an immersive field in which archival footage, memes, historical fragments, and nonlinear staged sequences fold into one another, collapsing the boundaries between past, present, and speculative future. The cinematic result is one that insists history is not a fixed, concluded event, but an active field of forces shaping the aesthetics, rhythms, and possibilities of Black life today.

Program Details
Doors open at 5 PM. Program begins at 5:30 PM.
The screening will be preceded by The Record We Keep, a conversation on authorship, archive, and ownership facilitated by Ellis Sawyer.
Panelists:

BK Fulton — Soulidifly Productions & PBS American Masters
Kristen Adele Calhoun — Co-writer of BLKNWS & theater maker
Dr. Douglas A. Jones, Jr. — Scholar of Black performance, Duke University