Waves of Light, Rhythm of Steel: How Kahlil Joseph's BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions Rearranges the Afro-Diasporic Present
Kahlil Joseph’s film BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions is a radical, poetic event in contemporary art: an audiovisual manifesto that pulsates like a techno track from Detroit—polyrhythmic, fragmentary, innovative.
The power of this debut feature film, which premiered at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival and has since been celebrated at international festivals, lies in its uncompromisingly experimental structure and its emotional impact. As co-director of Beyoncé’s Lemonade (2016, with Mark Romanek), Kahlil Joseph was nominated for an Emmy. In BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions, he weaves essay film, science fiction, Afrofuturism, and documentary research into a cinematic experience that consistently defies classic categorization.
The plot centers on journalist Sarah (played with complexity by Shaunette Renée Wilson), who accompanies the fictional Transatlantic Biennial aboard the fictional cruise ship The Nautica. There she meets curator Funmilayo Akachukwu (Kaneza Schaal), whose exhibition of works by African American artists from around the world opens up a resonance chamber of Black history and the present.
But for Joseph, the real plot serves only as an anchor point in an ocean of intertwined stories, references, and imagery. Like a DJ switching between tracks in a club, the film jumps through time and cultural contexts—from a fictional historian and civil rights activist, W.E.B. Du Bois, and his dream of a Black encyclopedia, to the archives of Senga Nengudi and Raven Jackson, to the personal pain of the loss of Joseph’s brother Noah Davis (who, together with his wife Karon Davis and his brother, founded the Underground Museum in Los Angeles).
Like energetic techno music
The kaleidoscopic structure of the film is more than just a metaphor: Joseph and his team explicitly structure BLKNWS into 21 “tracks”—chapters that are loosely connected, as on a mix tape, but each of which unfolds its own dramaturgy and energy. Like an electronic track, the film grows out of sparse motifs, creating loops and breaks, condensing samples—images, newspaper articles, photos, historical documents, interviews—into audiovisual patterns that constantly vary and reconnect.
The montage creates a hypnotic flow in which abstraction and direct experience go hand in hand. BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions can be “shuffled” like an album, but it always maintains a rhythmically elegant, repetitive pull that draws the viewer into the narrative. At the heart of the flow beats the wonderful techno score composed by Klein, complemented by pieces by James William Blades, P. Morris, and Avila Santos. The music, reduced in part to a dark, rolling bass and nervous hi-hats, underscores the scenes like a pulse. It creates an electronic sound space that holds together collages of images and text while simultaneously releasing new meanings. In contrast to classical film music, the soundtrack functions as a driving force: techno becomes an aesthetic attitude, a code of rebellious perseverance against linear storytelling and common genre templates.
Together with Joseph, Paul Rogers (Everything Everywhere All at Once) was responsible for the editing, while Bradford Young’s camera (including Arrival) makes light, glass, and water dance to the rhythm of the score, and the space between the characters seems electrically charged. This makes BLKNWS a film that never lets its audience go, asserting its own reality with its music, visual drive, and intellectual references: black, polyphonic, global, and full of optimism.
Audiovisual compendium
The BLKNWS project began as a pitch for a 30-minute TV news show. The film does not show what news is, but rather demonstrates in an eye-opening way what news could be. It is at once an encyclopedia and science fiction, a memorial and a pop culture archive. Joseph and his co-authors (including renowned literary scholar Saidiya Hartman) draw on texts, interviews, and artifacts that make BLKNWS appear like a fluid repository of knowledge—inspired and accompanied by Du Bois’ idea of an “Encyclopedia Africana.”
Highly acclaimed by international critics and awarded numerous prizes, BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions is already considered one of the most important works on contemporary Black culture and identity. With BLKNWS, Kahlil Joseph opens a sonic cinema that uses sounds and images to set a new pace for the experiences, struggles, and dreams of the Black diaspora—drawing the audience into the rhythm of a techno night that lingers long after it ends.
Roman Scheiber
© FIPRESCI 2025