Hale County This Morning, This Evening
An impressionistic portrait of a largely African American community in Alabama, filmed over half a decade in the 2010s, director RaMell Ross’s nonfiction feature debut subverts convention by allowing its subjects to shape the narrative with a collective, multi-person viewpoint. With creative input from Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Laura Poitras, this poignant, sporadically transcendent documentary won multiple accolades, including an Oscar nomination and a prestigious Peabody Award.
Latrenda 'Boosie' Ash, Karmyn Bryant, Korbyn Bryant
- Notes From Mike MillsI found this film so striking and powerful and mysterious, so beautiful, so deeply trusting a visual language and trusting human presence (human watching?) as a cinematic act that can replace the forward motion of “plot.” And I love that I could feel the presence of the person behind the camera and, in a wordless way, feel a connection between him and the people in front of the camera. Isn’t that wonderful? Also, kind of like Virginia Woolf’s THE WAVES, it’s so much about our physical world, the spaces we live in and have emotions in and play out the possibilities of our lives in. The way the film could evoke the structural and historical powers that be in that place too.
