Adapted from Joseph’s renowned video installation, BLKNWS is conceived with the fluidity of an album. Its 21 tracks weave fiction and history, cinema and video art, documentary and social media. Poets, writers, editors, designers, musicians and scholars leave their mark, while Bradford Young’s images and Klein’s experimental score give the film its pulse.
An undercover journalist boards the Nautica, an international cruise liner carrying the Transatlantic Biennale. From there, the voyage opens outward: fictionalised W. E. B. Du Bois and Marcus Garvey meet contemporary artists, musicians, Joseph’s family, news images and Twitter chats in a vision of Black consciousness moving across land, sea and time.
Rather than contain Black life within a single narrative, BLKNWS creates a layered field of ideas, memories and encounters. The archive becomes living material; personal history opens onto the Black Atlantic; and the moving image becomes both artistic medium and tool for cultural critique.
