HALE COUNTY THIS MORNING, THIS EVENING

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.

2018  African-American Studies  American Studies  Cinema Studies  Media Studies  Academy Award Winners & Nominees  2019 

Official Selection - San Francisco International Film Festival 2018

Official Selection - CPH:DOX 2018

Official Selection - Sarasota Film Festival 2018

"[B]ecause somewhere in the making of Hale County, it started to feel revelatory. The process of documenting, of participating in these lives, and making these associations, it was almost like a drug — an insight drug, where I was constantly able to see the world anew, and see my people and my race in a way in which I hadn’t encountered yet, specifically in cinema."

- Ramell Ross from No One See's The World Like Ramell Ross - By Bilge Ebiri