“As formally inventive as it is intellectually exciting” – The New York Times
Adapted from Kahlil Joseph’s renowned video art installation, BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions is a distinctive cinematic experience that mirrors the sonic textures of a record album, weaving fiction and history in an immersive journey where the fictionalized figures of W. E. B Du Bois and Marcus Garvey join artists, musicians, Joseph’s family, and even Twitter chats, in a vision for Black consciousness.
Conceived as a continuous, curated broadcast, BLKNWS merges news clips, social media content, and cultural artifacts into a dynamic stream that reflects the richness of Black life. First showcased at the Venice Biennale in 2019, BLKNWS has since expanded into a networked platform, featuring satellite installations in barbershops, cafés, and community spaces. Having directed music videos for artists such as Kendrick Lamar, FKA Twigs, Sampha, and Beyoncé, Joseph creates work that bridges art and community, and has assembled an incredibly talented and accomplished group for this project, his first feature, delivering what HPR calls “one of the best films of 2025.”
Join director Kahlil Joseph, writer and academic Christina Sharpe and special guests for a virtual post-screening discussion on Friday, January 23. Moderated by writer, scholar and film curator Nataleah Hunter-Young.
Kahlil Joseph is a Los Angeles–based filmmaker and visual artist. Moving fluidly between cinema, journalism, and contemporary art, Kahlil’s practice often centres on the aesthetics of Black life and consciousness. He has directed short-form pieces for artists including Kendrick Lamar, FKA Twigs, Sampha, Beyoncé and Flying Lotus, and has exhibited work at the Venice Biennale, the Tate Modern and the Underground Museum, which he co-founded in Los Angeles. BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions is his first feature-length film.
Christina Sharpe is a writer and Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Black Studies in the Humanities at York University. She is the author of Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, and Ordinary Notes—winner of the Hilary Weston Writer’s Trust Prize in Nonfiction and the Hodler Prize and a Finalist for the National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award in Nonfiction. In 2024 she was awarded the Canada Council for the Arts Molson Prize for the Sciences and Humanities, a Windham-Campbell Prize in Nonfiction, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 2025 she received the Killam Prize.
Our friends from A Different Booklist will be at the Cinema with books for sale before and after each screening.
TICKETS (+HST)
General: $15
Members: $10, $8, FREE