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‘BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions’ Review: Khalil Joseph’s Rich, Impressionistic Docu-Fiction Essay Reimagines the World
Re-added to Sundance after controversy, the incredible docu-fiction piece 'BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions' is one of the festival’s most exciting films.
Among these touchstones is techno music, a genre whose Black origins are often obscured, but which Joseph deploys to tremendous effect, turning the sounds of Detroit first wave artists (like Juan Atkins) into guiding tempos for his oblique editing, which take on the ebbs and flows of a carefully curated album. The film uses this tongue-in-cheek fiction as a platform to explore decolonial ideas and images, including Garvey’s Back-to-Africa political movement (the aforementioned sci-fi ships are descendants of the Black Star Line ocean liners), as well as contemporary efforts to liberate African countries from neocolonial influence. The film is, in many ways, an attempt to reimagine a world in which Blackness is the primary lens of seeing and understanding, but the choral echoes of Paul Goodwin score what is practically a spiritual lament over the limitations of this redefining, appearing in close proximity to glowing re-creations of the solar system, and of sunlight skimming off Earth and the other planets, in the vein of Malick’s “The Tree of Life.”
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