This article appeared in a special February 7, 2025 edition of The Film Comment Letter, our free weekly newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing. Sign up for the Letter here.

BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions (Kahlil Joseph, 2025)

I can’t begin to imagine what it would have been like to be on the ground at Sundance in the year 2025. But the disconnect between many of the movies in the lineup and the fact that the United States and the planet are hurtling toward disaster faster than Robert Redford in Downhill Racer (1969) must have been as evident in Park City as it was to me while streaming Sundance movies on my TV and PC in NYC. Redford’s character survives at the end of Michael Ritchie’s theatrical debut, but his face tells us that he knows winning is not forever. He founded Sundance as an antidote to the Hollywood studios, and I miss him appearing on opening day to say “Sundance is for the filmmakers”—even though by the mid-1990s, it was fast becoming a producer’s and agency’s market, and many filmmakers did not object to that.

A refuge and charging station for resistance, Kahlil Joseph’s BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions was by far the most exciting selection that I saw, in terms of both form and content. The latest iteration of Joseph’s ongoing BLKNWS video and art project—which grew out of a permanent work at the Underground Museum in Los Angeles and originally surfaced in the mainstream art world as a two-channel installation at the Venice Biennale in 2019—is the first to be shaped like a feature film, with its basic collage structure driven by sound and music (beatific beats) and organized around two intersecting locus points. One is the Africana Encyclopedia, the decades-long project of W.E.B. Du Bois, left unfinished at his death in 1963, then edited, expanded, and published by Kwame Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates Jr. in 1999 as Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African-American Experience. The other is an Afrofuturist fiction set during a “Transatlantic Biennial,” an exhibition taking place on a ship anchored at the center of the maritime routes for the boats that carried Africans into slavery in Brazil, the Caribbean, and the United States. “This is not a documentary,” Joseph remarks in voiceover, just before we see clips of Agnes Varda and Jean-Luc Godard, his early filmmaking role models whose work defied categorization.

BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions is a collaboration between Joseph and his artist, filmmaker, and intellectual peers, among them Saidiya Hartman, Fred Moten, the late curator Okwui Enwezor, Arthur Jafa, Garrett Bradley, and Joseph’s late brother, the lyrical figurative painter Noah Davis—for me the greatest painter of the early 21st century. It is also a moving-image bildungsroman that hints at how the concept of the Underground Museum—a generative space for Black culture, founded in 2012 by Davis his wife, Karon Davis—is now funneled onto the screen in the form of BLKNWS, a movie with global potential. In the Q&A after the screening, Joseph said that he wanted the movie to be available for free on YouTube so that people could watch it together and pause it often to investigate references and talk about them. But I also want people to see it on the biggest possible screen with the liveliest, most resonant sound system, which is still the way that films as great as this deserve to be seen.

There were only two or three other films that I hope have a life after Sundance. The rueful, understatedly caustic comedy Sorry, Baby is a more-than-promising feature debut by writer-director Eva Victor, who also stars as Agnes, a young woman to whom something very bad happens just before she gets her degree in creative writing from a small New England college. The same bad thing has been an issue in far too many movies in recent years, but I can’t remember it being depicted—or rather, recounted—with such subtlety and complexity. Victor’s most brilliant choice is not to show the bad thing but to leave us outside the house where we know it is happening, watching day turn to night and the lights changing behind the front windows, until Agnes suddenly emerges, sprints across the front yard, jumps in her car, and drives to her best friend’s house. Only much later does she give a minute-to-minute description of what we didn’t see, including her own confused and aborted attempts to keep it from happening. Victor has an amazing and unique sense of timing, as both director and actor, and a keen eye and ear for how the space around a word or a small bodily movement surprises us and makes us excited about what might come next.

At a time when anti-intellectualism is running rampant as it hasn’t since the 1950s, it’s a comfort to see at least two movies, BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions and Sorry, Baby, that celebrate the life of the mind. The other fiction films I saw ranged from pallid to dismal. Hailey Gates’s Atropia won the U.S. Dramatic Competition’s Grand Jury Prize, but for me, this is not the moment for a mockumentary layered onto a fictionalization of actual war games played by American troops before they are shipped out from California to Iraq.

Among the documentaries, Geeta Gandbhir’s The Perfect Neighbor, which Devika wrote about last week, uses low-end police bodycam footage to disclose a lethal situation of racism. Flying an HBO Documentary Films banner, Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman’s The Alabama Solution also employs basic tech: cell-phone videos and FaceTime conversations recorded by inmates of Alabama’s penal system to expose horrendous conditions and barbaric treatment and neglect. The recordings are central to the resistance movement led by prisoners Melvin Ray and Robert Earl Council, who continue their struggle despite being beaten and thrown into solitary confinement. Alabama stonewalled the U.S. Justice department throughout the Biden presidency—and good luck to any change in the future.

This was the festival’s second to last edition under contract with Park City, Utah. There was little public conversation about where its next home might be, although Boulder, Colorado; Cincinnati, Ohio; and a hybrid of Salt Lake City and Park City have all been shortlisted by the Sundance Institute. I still remember the uproar caused by a citizens’ group’s attempt to close an exhibition of Robert Mapplethorpe photographs in 1990 in Cincinnati, and the obscenity trial that ensued. Artistic freedom prevailed in that case, but three and a half decades later, we live in less enlightened—so to speak—times. The snow in Park City is one thing; the chilling effect of public institutions run by newly emboldened conservatives is quite another.

Amy Taubin lives in New York City, where she writes about movies and art.