MATTER

Friday May 29

BLK NWS:
Terms & Conditions

A one evening screening, panel conversation, and wrap-around bookshop.

Presenting Sponsors Run of Show Panelists Community Activator Bookshop Reading More Black Cinema

Presenting Sponsors

Run of Show

5:00 PM Wrap-around bookshop opens with The Shop at MATTER.
5:30 PM Pre-screening social.
6:50 PM Announcements with Rick Griffith and Jeff Levine.
7:00 PM Screening: BLK NWS: Terms & Conditions.
8:45 PM Stage transition.
8:50 PM Panel conversation.
9:15 PM Bookstore closes.

Panelists

Kahlil Joseph

Kahlil Joseph

Filmmaker, BLK NWS: Terms & Conditions

Kahlil Joseph is a filmmaker, music-video director, and video artist. BLK NWS: Terms & Conditions expands his acclaimed installation practice into a feature-length cinematic work built from news, memory, history, music, and Black life.

Julian Bleecker

Julian Bleecker

Designer, engineer, and founder, Near Future Laboratory

Julian Bleecker is a designer, engineer, researcher, and founder of Near Future Laboratory. His practice connects speculative design, product imagination, technology, culture, and tangible artifacts from possible futures.

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Shari Frilot

Shari Frilot

Senior Programmer & Chief Curator, New Frontier, Sundance Film Festival

Shari Frilot is an artist, filmmaker, senior programmer for the Sundance Film Festival, and chief curator of Sundance's New Frontier program. Her work has helped shape public encounters with Black independent cinema, and a wide breadth of experimental forms of cinematic expression. She provoked the creation of the prototype for the Oculus Rift, and supported a proliferation of immersive storytelling experiments which lead to multiple technological and storytelling breakthroughs.

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Rick Griffith

Rick Griffith

Design Director, MATTER

Rick Griffith is a designer, writer, letterpress printer, and co-founder of MATTER in Denver, a design studio, typography laboratory, workshop, and bookstore. His work links design practice to civic imagination, publishing, and community.

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Lisa Kennedy

Lisa Kennedy

Contributor to Variety and The New York Times

Lisa Kennedy is a Denver-based writer whose film criticism has appeared in the New York Times, Variety, the Denver Post, Alta magazine and other publications.

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Community Activator

The Embers

The Embers - Follow Us @TheEmbers.Agency on IG

Connecting Colorado film communities to each other, to the world, and the world back to Colorado.

Founded by two Denver natives.

The Embers exists to foster connection across Colorado's evolving creative community through film, conversation, and cultural programming - while maintaining a strong dialogue with global creative culture.

We create spaces where filmmakers, artists, audiences, and institutions can gather, exchange ideas, and build lasting connections across both local and international creative communities.

The Embers symbolizes a creative fire that lasts:

something passed between people, carried forward, and built together over time.

Open to everyone, with a commitment to amplifying voices and stories from historically underrepresented communities.

Bookstore Partner

The Shop at MATTER bookstore

The Shop at MATTER

Hosting local and national authors, The Seminar, Creating and Printing Workshops, The Shop at MATTER is a full service bookstore that features fiction and non-fiction works by Black, Queer, Trans, authors and artists. More at shopatmatter.com.

BLK NWS Reading List

BLK NWS Reading List at Bookshop.org

Below are some classics: Each might open a door to an incredible talent or concept or both.

Cover of Black Skin, White Masks
Black Skin, White Masks
Frantz Fanon
A foundational, psychologically sharp study of colonial racism and the masks it forces onto Black life.
Cover of The Wretched of the Earth
The Wretched of the Earth
Frantz Fanon
Fierce, difficult, and still urgent: Fanon's classic diagnosis of colonial violence and liberation.
Cover of In the Wake
In the Wake
Christina Sharpe
A devastating and lyrical work of criticism that reads Black life inside the ongoing weather of slavery.
Cover of Black Looks
Black Looks
bell hooks
Clear, cutting essays on spectatorship, representation, whiteness, and the politics of looking.
Cover of Scenes of Subjection
Scenes of Subjection
Saidiya Hartman
An unflinching rereading of slavery and freedom that changes how the archive itself can be seen.
Cover of The Sovereignty of Quiet
The Sovereignty of Quiet
Kevin Quashie
A beautiful argument for interior life, vulnerability, and quiet as powerful Black expressiveness.
Cover of Representing Blackness
Representing Blackness
Valerie Smith
A useful film-studies reader on authenticity, racial image-making, and Black independent cinema.
Cover of The Black Atlantic
The Black Atlantic
Paul Gilroy
A field-shaping study of diaspora, modernity, music, and identity beyond national borders.
Cover of The Undercommons
The Undercommons
Fred Moten & Stefano Harney
Dense, fugitive, and beloved: a radical invitation into Black study, refusal, and shared life.
Cover of Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments
Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments
Saidiya Hartman
A gorgeous experiment in history-writing, recovering Black women's lives from hostile records.
Cover of Lose Your Mother
Lose Your Mother
Saidiya Hartman
A searching journey along the slave route, intimate in grief and rigorous about historical loss.
Cover of Afrotopia
Afrotopia
Felwine Sarr
A compact, optimistic manifesto for African futures built from culture, economics, and imagination.
Cover of Freedom Dreams
Freedom Dreams
Robin D. G. Kelley
A generous history of radical imagination that treats dreams as serious political work.
Cover of The Fire Next Time
The Fire Next Time
James Baldwin
Baldwin at full voltage: intimate, prophetic essays on race, faith, love, and American failure.
Cover of Sister Outsider
Sister Outsider
Audre Lorde
Essential essays and speeches where difference becomes a source of power, language, and action.
Cover of We Real Cool
We Real Cool
bell hooks
A tough-love critique of Black masculinity, patriarchy, pain, and the possibility of healing.
Cover of Black Futures
Black Futures
Kimberly Drew & Jenna Wortham
A vibrant anthology-scrapbook of Black art, internet life, memory, joy, and possibility.

More Black Cinema

Killer of SheepKiller of SheepCharles Burnett
A quiet masterpiece of everyday life, full of blues feeling, labor, tenderness, and exhaustion.
Daughters of the DustDaughters of the DustJulie Dash
Lush, poetic, and transportive, a landmark portrait of memory, migration, and Gullah culture.
Tongues UntiedTongues UntiedMarlon Riggs
A fierce video essay of poetry, testimony, desire, grief, and Black gay self-definition.
Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take OneSymbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take OneWilliam Greaves
A sly, restless meta-documentary where process, performance, and revolt fold into one another.
Losing GroundLosing GroundKathleen Collins
Elegant and searching, with philosophy, romance, art, and self-possession all under pressure.
Ganja and HessGanja & HessBill Gunn
Hypnotic Black horror that turns blood, religion, addiction, and desire into ritual cinema.
IllusionsIllusionsJulie Dash
A sharp Hollywood ghost story about voice, race, wartime propaganda, and who gets erased.
Do the Right ThingDo the Right ThingSpike Lee
Explosive, funny, formally electric, and still painfully alive in its portrait of racial tension.
MoonlightMoonlightBarry Jenkins
Tender and luminous, a coming-of-age film where silence, touch, and color carry enormous feeling.
OriginOriginAva DuVernay
Ambitious and intellectually forceful, turning an idea-driven book into a film about grief and structure.
PassingPassingRebecca Hall
Restrained and elegant, a tense study of racial performance, intimacy, envy, and danger.
The Watermelon WomanThe Watermelon WomanCheryl Dunye
Witty, intimate, and formally playful, inventing archive where official film history left absence.
All Dirt Roads Taste of SaltAll Dirt Roads Taste of SaltRaven Jackson
A tactile, lyrical memory film where touch, landscape, family, and time move like water.

Programming

Organized by Rick Griffith and the team at MATTER. Feel free to reach out.