December 9, 2025
by Carla Hay
Directed by Kahlil Joseph
Culture Representation: The non-fiction film “BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions” features a predominantly African American group of people (with a few white people) in a montage collection of images that evoke pages from the non-fiction book “Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience.”
Culture Clash: Various cultures and eras are represented in the movie, which includes archival news footage, still photos, re-enactment footage, and clips from movies and TV shows.
Culture Audience: “BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions” will appeal primarily to people who are interested in unconventional movies that explore African and African American cultures.
“BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions” is more of a visual feast than a wealth of information. It’s formatted less like a documentary and more like a museum art installation that interprets the 1999 non-fiction book “Africana.” These visual images include archival news footage, still photographs, re-enactment footage, and clips from movies and TV shows.
Directed by Kahlil Joseph, “BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions” is his feature-film directorial debut. “BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions” had its world premiere at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival and made the rounds at several other festivals in 2025, including the Berlin International Film Festival, the Toronto International Film Festival and the New York Film Festival. Kwame Anthony Appiah’s 1999 book “Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience” is given a cinematic portrait in this movie, which takes pages from the book in non-sequential order and assigns visual images to those pages.
The movie begins with an image of someone (whose hands are only shown on screen) opening the book. A caption from director Joseph explains that he and his younger brother got the book as a gift from their father on February 28, 2000. It was the dream of sociologist/writer/scholar W.E.B. Du Buois to write this type of book. He started the project at six months before he died in 1963, at the age of 95.
The movie includes details of Dubois’ 1962 visit to newly independent Ghana, at the invitation of president Kwame Nkrumah. In the movie’s re-enactment footage, Peter Jay Fernandez portrays an elderly Du Bois, while Kaneza Schaal has the role of young adult Du Bois. To give further context the Ghanaian history presented in the movie, “BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions” include 2023 news footage Business Incorporated about Ghana’s economy in 2023.
The movie’s still photos fly quickly by in montage form, showing a wide variety of prominent public figures, historical events and lifestyles from African and African American cultures. Some of what’s included in these montages are images of jazz, James Baldwin, Nikki Giovanni, Rastafarianism, Jamaica, Marcus Garvey, Whitney Houston, Willie Mays, voodoo, and Haiti.
“BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions” also features Shaunette Renée Wilson as a journalist named Sarah, who is investigating an exhibit of new and artifact items that have been returned. This scene couldn’t be more timely during a political climate when museums devoted to African and African American culture have come under anti-“DEI” attacking criticisms that sometimes demand the removal of certain items in these museums that present the shameful history of racism against black people. The anti-DEI critics often argue that these items are “racist” against white people.
Other people featured in “BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions” include transgender activist/author Hope Giselle and Bria Henderson as American feminist Fannie Lou Hamer. The movie experiments with images, such as showing a photo of people in an African American barbershop that has a video screen with these words superimposed on the screen: “Radical Critique of the Present. BLKNWS 2017- Present.”
Joseph has a background in directing music videos (he’s collaborated with Beyoncé multiple times, most notably for her 2016 “Lemonade” video album), so the quick-cutting visual style of music videos is very much present in “BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions.” It’s an adventurous and unconventional film that won’t be to everyone’s liking if a viewer is seeking a more traditional format for a non-fiction movie. A captioned announcement in the beginning of the film emphatically states: “This is not a documentary.” “BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions” is a collage of images that can take viewers on a somewhat shallow but interesting journey.
Rich Spirit released “BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions” in select U.S. cinemas on November 26, 2025.