Far and away the best film to premiere at Sundance Film Festival this year was Raven Jackson’s directorial debut All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt. Produced by Barry Jenkins and edited by Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s collaborator Lee Chatametikool, the film takes a beautifully poetic decades-spanning look at a woman’s life in Mississippi. Nine months after its Sundance premiere, the film will finally resurface as part of New York Film Festival’s just-announced Main Slate followed by an A24 release later this fall. Ahead of the release, the first trailer and poster have arrived.
I said in my review, “Raven Jackson’s directorial debut All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt is a distillation of cinema to its purest form, a stunning patchwork of experience and memory. Daring in its formal gambits but universal for how it explores humanity’s connection with nature, loss, and love, it’s among few films in the history of Sundance that genuinely seems to advance the language and possibilities of cinema. With adoring notes of Terrence Malick, Andrei Tarkovsky, Carlos Reygadas, and Julie Dash, Jackson isn’t wholly reinventing what has come before, but rather pushing this poetic-based variety into thrilling new territories.”
Starring Charleen McClure, Moses Ingram, Reginald Helms Jr., Zainab Jah, with Sheila Atim and Chris Chalk, see the trailer and poster below.
All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt plays at the 61st New York Film Festival and opens this fall.