One of the most poetic, transportive documentaries of the year is RaMell Ross’ Hale County This Morning, This Evening, a portrait of life in Alabama told in fragments. Premiering at Sundance Film Festival earlier this year, where it picked up a Special Jury Prize, I caught it at Closing Night of New Directors/New Films was astounded the amount of life Ross packed into a formally bold 78 minutes. Ahead of a release in a few weeks, Cinema Guild has now released the first trailer for the film which features Apichatpong Weerasethakul as a Creative Advisor.
Dan Schindel said in his review, “The doc has a special interest in repetition, like a basketball team going through its drills or a toddler running back and forth across a room playing some game that makes sense only to them. Chronology and specific geography are purposefully difficult to discern (one woman goes through a pregnancy during the film, but its timeline is even longer than that), though the 2017 solar eclipse makes an appearance. Joys (childbirth) and tragedies (an infant succumbing to SIDS) are given equal quiet weight, and always filmed around rather than focused upon. The doc is more invested in mourners after a burial than in immediate reactions or big events. This is a story made of the in-between pieces of stories.”
Set to open on September 14 at IFC Center and BAM in New York City then the week later at Laemmle’s Monica and Playhouse in Los Angeles, check out the trailer below.
An inspired and intimate portrait of a place and its people, Hale County This Morning, This Evening looks at the lives of Daniel Collins and Quincy Bryant, two young African American men from rural Hale County, Alabama, over the course of five years. Collins attends college in search of opportunity while Bryant becomes a father to an energetic son in an open-ended, poetic form that privileges the patiently observed interstices of their lives. The audience is invited to experience the mundane and monumental, birth and death, the quotidian and the sublime. These moments combine to communicate the region’s deep culture and provide glimpses of the complex ways the African American community’s collective image is integrated into America’s visual imagination.
In his directorial debut, award-winning photographer and director RaMell Ross offers a refreshingly direct approach to documentary that fills in the gaps between individual black male icons. 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 offering a testament to dreaming despite the odds.
Hale County This Morning, This Evening opens on September 14.