One of the most essential documentary releases of the year, Hale County This Morning, This Evening has garnered terrific reviews as well as multiple awards following festival screenings worldwide.
The directorial debut of award-winning photographer and director RaMell Ross, it’s an inspired and intimate portrait of a place and its people, following two young African American men from rural Hale County, Alabama – Daniel Collins and Quincy Bryant – over five years as Collins attends college and Bryant becomes a father.
Filmed with an open-ended lyricism, Ross invites you to undergo both the mundane and monumental experiences of both young men’s lives; with the quotidian – including church services, basketball games and family gatherings – alongside the sublime. But via these contemporary lives, Ross also works more deeply to generate ideas about race and the region’s social and cultural past, exploring the complex and problematic legacy of the African American community’s collective image in the American imagination.
An inspired and ambitious tapestry, Hale County… offers a wonderfully emotive and impressionistic picture of the South that trumpets the beauty of individual lives while exploring the consequences of the social construction of race; creating a moving testament to dreaming and to history as well as an urgent political critique questioning issues of representation in images of black America.
