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Lydia Peckham had climbed one of the taller trees in her family’s apple orchard in New Zealand, strapping a camera to a neighboring branch with a bungee cord and placing herself opposite it.

The reason for Peckham’s impromptu jaunt through the foliage was Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes. Unlike the other Planet of the Apes entries, this one would be populated with nearly all CGI apes, one of which Peckham had been asked to audition to play.  “When I first got the audition, I thought, ‘Oh, my god, how am I gonna act like an ape in front of a white wall?’ It seemed like a recipe for disaster,” she remembers. She instead hatched the idea to do the self-tape from an apple tree.

She laughs, “You always hear those crazy audition stories, and there are only a few projects that it actually works for.” It did, in fact, work, with Peckham landing the role as the chimpanzee named Soona.

After an itinerant childhood that took her family from Edinburgh to the West Coast of Scotland and then to France, Peckham grew up in New Zealand on the apple orchard without a television but with ample idle time. She discovered acting in high school by way of Shakespeare, and a state-sponsored program that let her travel to England, where she played Ariel in The Tempest on both the Old Globe stage and the Minack Theatre in Cornwall. When she returned, she enrolled in drama school, after which, she says, “From there, the hustle began.”

Her first big studio role was in the Wes Ball-directed Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, which takes place a long while after the other recent Planet of the Apes entries, with Apes firmly established as the dominant species on Earth. Various ape tribes fight for dominance, while human history has largely become the stuff of lore.

After being cast, Peckham had six weeks of what she calls “Ape training.” Says the actress, “Usually you’re starting with the script.” Instead, the pre-production prep was focused on physical performance. “Rather than diving in first with your brain, it was about how your body can interpret something.”

As for filming, Peckham welcomed the atypical acting realities of the motion capture performance. “There’s zero ego,” she says. “Number one, you are dressed in a gray suit with 100 dots on you. Number two, you are making sounds and moving in such an obscure way. It shreds some of that self-consciousness.”

But her next project, Nuremberg, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, proved very different from Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes. “I did this one just in a slightly more standard audition way,” she says. (Read: no tree.)

The James Vanderbilt-directed historical drama follows WWII psychiatrist Douglas Kelley (Rami Malek), who evaluates Nazi leaders for the Nuremberg trials and is tasked with determining if Hermann Göring (Russell Crowe) is fit to stand trial. Leo Woodall, John Slattery and Richard E. Grant are among the film’s other stars.

In the movie, Peckham plays one of the few fictional characters, Lila, a journalist covering the trials. With no real-life counterpart to study, ahead of filming, she researched female journalists of the time.

“What I didn’t know was that WWII was actually part of the liberation of women,” she says. “Women stepped into roles that they’d never really been allowed enter, and when men came back, they were like, ‘No, we will stay.’” To help her performance, she thought of Lila as a part of that movement, saying, “She puts the work first.”

Nuremberg, which will be released in theaters on Nov. 7 by Sony Pictures Classics, was positively reviewed out of TIFF, with The Hollywood Reporter’s review reading, “Vanderbilt’s commanding Nuremberg couldn’t have arrived at a more consequential time.” It has been tapped as a possible awards contender.

As for what’s next for Peckham, she is taking on yet another genre, this time folklore, playing Priscilla of Nottingham in MGM’s Robin Hood series that stars Sean Bean and Connie Nielsen.

After projects that have spanned a post-human far future, a 1940s post-wartime tribunal and 14th-century England, Peckham is hoping for something set in the present day. She says, “Just to branch out of the shackles of time.”

Introducing BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions at the Toronto International Film Festival last week, the director and artist Kahlil Joseph advised his audience to let the film “wash over you”. In its original form, BLKNWS was an evolving multi-channel installation exhibited at the 2019 Venice Biennale, the 2020 Sundance Film Festival, the Made in LA 2020 biennial and elsewhere. It takes much of its inspiration from a book, though not one with a beginning, middle and end: Encyclopedia Africana, a compendium of African and diasporic culture conceived by W.E.B. Du Bois and realised after his death by Henry Louis Gates and Kwame Anthony Appiah. Watching the film is like leafing through the book, as images stream by onscreen, accompanied by a title card and a page number. Figures and concepts like Marcus Garvey (page 63), Harlem (page 100) and Sun Ra (page 333) are illustrated with clips from stock footage and archival photos, as well as memes, TikTok clips and academic panel discussions pulled from YouTube.

The density is meant to be overwhelming and impossible to consciously assimilate in its totality. The soundtrack includes music, poems, voiceover and interview, and cuts forge synaptic pathways between images from sources both well-known and obscure: a clipping of Doreen St. Felix’s New Yorker piece on Alexandra Bell’s political photomontages, a scene from Ghost Dog: Way of the Samurai (1999), an overhead view of Nicholas Galanin’s environmental installation Never Forget (2021), a picture of Breonna Taylor, video of teenagers popping wheelies, faded newsreels of the riverboats of the Mississippi, crumpled old photos of Black soldiers of the First World War.

Atop this Joseph layers additional conceits. “BLKNWS” is also an alternative news outlet reporting from the horizon of possibility, encompassing news-ticker breaking updates on the fall of the British monarchy and the rise of the “African Gold Standard”; semifictional investigative reports on the location of the contested Benin ivory masks; interviews with composite characters who embody chapters in African history, such as slave profiteering; and a tribute to the Ghanian muckraker Anas.

In its half-decade journey to becoming a feature film, BLKNWS has accrued multiple additional layers. Scripted sequences function as structuring elements of this iteration, dreamily echoing each other across the runtime, encompassing histories real and imagined, records official and legendary. This includes reenactments of a young Du Bois going door to door for his 1890s sociological study The Philadelphia Negro and an elderly Du Bois, now living in independent Ghana, embarking at last on the Encyclopedia Africana in the months before his death. There is also a strand about an enterprising investigative journalist seeking an interview with the curator of the Transatlantic Biennial, an exhibition of works including looted artefacts and a project by Cameron Rowland, all aboard an Afrofuturist hovercraft-like ship.

The Atlantic is a significant component of BLKNWS. In setting much of his film on a voyage which fancifully recreates the Middle Passage, Joseph echoes the work of Saidiya Hartman, a credited co-writer of BLKNWS whose scholarship includes work excavating the forgotten histories of the African diaspora, as well as that of John Akomfrah, whose Vertigo Sea applies a literally oceanic frame of reference to the overlapping subjects of colonialism, commerce and scientific discovery.

Akomfrah is a pioneer of multi-channel Black montage, a tradition in which Joseph’s practice belongs. These are Black film-makers who move between the film world and the art world, and whose work itself is similarly fluid, collaged from associative editing patterns. Arthur Jafa’s Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death (2016)—which draws from the shared visual vocabulary of Black American experience, from James Brown performance footage to cameraphone recordings of police violence, all radically compressed within the duration of Kanye West’s song Ultralight Beam—is an obvious predecessor to BLKNWS, and Jafa also collaborated with Joseph on this film.

So did Garrett Bradley, whose Time (2020) retells the story of a family, marked by incarceration, with their own primary-source recordings, as well as Raven Jackson, whose childhood reverie All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt (2023) employs tactile camerawork and scrambled chronology to evoke subjective rather than objective memory. Jackson shares a cinematographer, Jomo Fray, with RaMell Ross, whose Nickel Boys (2024) was released by Amazon Studios without sacrificing the interspersed historical footage and impressionistic camerawork of his earlier documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening (2018), which in alternating moments of vividness and elision found glimmers of personal and political consciousness that had been inaccessible to conventional storytelling and classical continuity. Primarily, these filmmakers are in search of new ways of knowing.

The challenge in this poetics is that any execution may, potentially, serve the concept equally well—one seemingly illogical but unexpectedly intuitive juxtaposition may subvert dominant storytelling paradigms much like any other. BLKNWS includes individual riffs that nudge the viewer down new neural pathways, such as a montage of loving Black couples from social media and home movies, introduced by a clip from Carmen Jones, or one juxtaposing H.R. Giger’s xenomorph design with statues of the Yoruba deity Eshu, as Wole Soyinka discusses how missionaries contorted the cosmology of the African religion to frame the trickster god as an equivalent to the Christian Satan. But in its overall heterogeneity it can feel cluttered, like rifling through the papers in an autodidact’s library rather than turning the pages of a single encyclopaedia.

Though BLKNWS now exists as a feature film, it’s more apt to call it a visual album—like Beyoncé’s Lemonade, of which Joseph was a key director. Its loose narrative, in which characters morph and recur like motifs, is plotted like a music video. Also including sections on the history of its own development, at the Underground Museum—the former Los Angeles space, founded by the film-maker’s late brother Noah Davis—BLKNWS is a film to wander in and out of, and at best embodies curator Okwui Enwezor’s description of art exhibitions as “thinking machines”, a formulation advanced in a talk that’s included as a clip inthe film, alongside so much else.

Watch a clip from BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions:

• BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions was shown at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival (until 14 September) and will be part of the main slate at the New York Film Festival (26 September-13 October), showing on 4 October and 5 October