Hale County This Morning, This Evening

(2018) dir RaMell Ross [76 min, DCP]

Having been hailed as one of the best films of 2018 in publications like Film Comment, The New York Times, and The New Yorker, the Brattle is excited to host this premiere run of RaMell Ross’s remarkable feature debut. Ross immerses the viewer in the lives of protagonists Daniel and Quincy where quotidian moments and the surrounding southern landscape are given equal 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, an 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 as far beyond.

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.