Coming off his transcendent first feature film, Kahlil Joseph looks back and forward

This is read by an automated voice.Please report any issues or inconsistencies here.

Los Angeles has a secret magic to which you have to earn access, and the way you earn it is by making it, becoming a contributor to the city’s misapprehended culture of spectacle and soul, diversity and monolithic elitism.It’s a get-in-where-you-fit-in or get-edged-all-the-way-out kind of city, wherein a deceptively laissez-faire game of musical chairs can determine your fate.

Kahlil Joseph has a private magic to which you have to earn access, and you earn it by resonating with the untapped nerve centers of Black culture that animate this city, and even then you might be denied.Joseph is like the city (Los Angeles, not Hollywood), and the city enforces confidentiality, drive, wit, style and devotion often mistaken for diva-ism.The filmmaker and video artist moved to Los Angeles from Seattle for university, and was quickly followed by his brother, the painter Noah Davis, who would found the Underground Museum, a venue and near-speakeasy with West Coast casual gravitas and pan-African rigor and breadth, which became as important to the zeitgeist of Black Los Angeles as both brothers have.In somewhat rapid succession, Joseph lost his father, Keven Davis, an accomplished attorney who represented the likes of the Williams sisters and Wynton Marsalis, in 2012, and his brother Noah in 2015.

Joseph navigated those years in the wake with unadorned reverence, while starting a family of his own and directing some of the most transcendent music videos of the 2010s.As testament to his resilience and that of the community around him, grief sharpened Joseph’s purpose and became a kind of grace he transmuted into moving images so saturated with feeling, sans easy pathos, they offered new ways of seeing.

The stakes were higher and layered with the existential absurdity of abrupt shifts, which he carried with an elegant, slightly seething temperament that has found its expression in the wo...