Evento

Hale County This Morning, This Evening

Sat Jan 19: 7.00pm
Sun Jan 20: 4.00pm

RaMell Ross
US
2018
1h 16m

About
Shot over a period of five years, RaMell Rosss remarkable directorial debut freely mixes forms, footage, and subjects to create an evocation of a place and its inhabitants. As its title, Hale County This Morning, This Evening, suggests, it is firmly rooted in a locale, that of the small-town Hale County, Alabama. It follows two young black men from the region: Daniel Collins, an aspiring college basketball player, and Quincy Bryant, a new father focused on raising his son.

Without sacrificing the necessary intimacy and fidelity required to represent these disparate yet emotionally aligned stories of promise, Ross fashions something incredibly elliptical, focused on the rhythms rather than the specific moments of this milieu. The passage of time is conveyed through montages that place different aspects of life side-by-side, intertitles that tantalize more than they explain, and above all Rosss striking camerawork, which envisions this impoverished location as a site of possibility and spontaneity. Hale County is ultimately a work deeply imbedded in its place and time, and that it manages to convey both this and an utterly unexpected feeling is more than a little astonishing.

Description courtesy of Ryan Swen.

"It's not every day that you witness a new cinematic language being born, but watching RaMell Ross' evocatively titled documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening qualifies." Bilge Ebiri, The Village Voice

"Ross has a preternatural talent for capturing moments, souls, and unorthodox time-lapses. Every shot seems to maximize the cinematographic potential of the scene through dexterous camerawork, while excellent sound collaging matches the scattered but chain-linked visuals. This is a man overflowing with vision." Theo Schear, Film Threat