As part of the Wavelengths section of this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, the doc BLKNEWS: TERMS & CONDITIONS is one of the should-be-talked-about-more part of the festival.
ABOUT: Celebrated artist and filmmaker Kahlil Joseph revisits and expands upon his eponymous two-channel “fugitive newscast” installation that was showcased at the 2019 Venice Biennale among other prestigious venues, in this galvanizing, shape-shifting exploration of Black history, identity, and possibility.
Joseph enlisted several prominent Black scholars and thinkers to co-write the film in an act of collective fabulation. Formally audacious and conceived as a cinematic experience that mirrors the sonic textures of an album, the film fluidly moves between modes, creating its own free-associative logic that mixes personal memoir, speculative narrative, archival footage, social media samples, and citations of work by other great artists (among them, a few notable Wavelengths alum).
Alongside original visual and auditory ideas, BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions is grounded in two parallel through lines. The first is the work of Pan-Africanist civil rights activist W. E. B. Du Bois, particularly his unfinished Encyclopedia Africana. This updated, illustrated compendium intersects with the fictional story of a journalist reporting on an Afro-futurist transatlantic art biennale taking place aboard a cruise ship called The Nautica — a gesture that both evokes Marcus Garvey and his mythic Black Star Line and renders homage to painter Noah Davis and his Underground Museum.
Capaciously collating reflections from major Black intellectuals like Saidiya Hartman and Fred Moten, and with the participation of exceptional talent like Arthur Jafa, Garrett Bradley, Grace Wales Bonner, and cinematographer Bradford Young, among others, the film’s timeline spans 247 years, all-the-while interrogating the ways in which cinema — fiction and documentary — as well as media writ large, can be reclaimed as a crucial act of intervention, critique, even mischief.
Reaction: I almost don’t even know how to write about this documentary experience and that is also the highest compliment I can give it.
BLKNWS: TERMS & CONDITIONS was a movie I had heard about from Seattle based filmmaker Kaili Joseph (he made the Beyonce music film LEMONADE) from this year’s Seattle International FIlm Festival, which I could not attend this year but made a note to keep an eye out for this one. I was thrilled that it was included at TIFF this year after much acclaim throughout SIFF along with Sundance.
This doc which is partly based on a news network and the history of African culture through a writer making this a late-life project, is something that becomes a tangible and deeply felt experience. It played and feels like an entirely new form of documentary storytelling. Even just a few minutes in I was enthralled as BLKNWS plays like a visual album and mix on the entire black experience through a unique eye. There’s a through line here about the reality of black history but also the evolution of time, technology and especially how events of the last few years have brought us all together.
Or something like that. This documentary brought out a lot of emotions and gets the feeling exactly right on how our culture has shifted through technology and our perceptions on how we have so many different perspectives all coming at us. Using a great amount of clips, narration, interview footage along with footage shot specifically for the presentation (some of which is so dreamlike), it comes across as a thrilling overall experience made for the big screen.
This is revolutionary in the same way the Oscar nominated doc SOUNDTRACK TO A COUP D’ÉTAT was last year, and I wish this movie nothing but success down the road. In a busy time with this festival and I feel like I have movies being thrown at me in every direction, this has totally restored my faith in the power of not just the documentary format but cinema overall. Don’t miss it.
