Hale County This Morning, This Evening
(RaMell Ross, 2018, 76 min, USA, English, Color, DCP)
NB: All free tickets for the 7pm screening have been claimed. There will be a stand-by line for attendees without ticket reservations. Once all ticketed patrons have been seated, those in the stand-by line will be afforded any vacant seats on first-come, first-served basis.
No reservations are required for the 9:30pm encore screening, which will not include a Q&A with the director.
Composed of intimate and unencumbered moments of people in a community, Hale County This Morning, This Evening allows the viewer an emotive impression of the Historic South—trumpeting the beauty of life and consequences of the social construction of race, while simultaneously a testament to dreaming—despite the odds.
How does one express the reality of individuals whose public image, lives, and humanity originate in exploitation? Photographer and filmmaker RaMell Ross employs the integrity of nonfiction filmmaking and the currency of stereotypical imagery to fill in the gaps between individual black male icons. Hale County This Morning, This Evening is a lyrical innovation to the form of portraiture that boldly ruptures racist aesthetic frameworks that have historically constricted the expression of African American men on film.
In the lives of protagonists Daniel and Quincy, quotidian moments and the surrounding southern landscape are given importance, drawing poetic comparisons between historical symbols and the African American banal. Images are woven together to replace narrative arc with visual movements. As Ross crafts an inspired tapestry made up of time, the human soul, history, environmental wonder, sociology, and cosmic phenomena, a new aesthetic framework emerges that offers a new way of seeing and experiencing the heat, and the hearts of people in the Black Belt region of the U.S. as well far beyond.
Winner: Grand Jury Award, Full Frame Documentary Film Festival 2018
“A poetic documentary with a gift for making enrapturing imagery out of what sound like ordinary, everyday events.” Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times
