Filming the Black Belt: An Interview with RaMell Ross

In a year when two major studio films—BlacKkKlansman and Green Book—dominated debates about race and the movies, RaMell Ross's extraordinary 2018 debut, Hale County This Morning, This Evening, can sometimes feel like it was made on another planet. Elusive, while those other movies played like blunt instruments; unsettling, while BlacKkKlansman and Green Book gave their respective audiences exactly what they paid for; Ross's documentary about two young black men and the Southern county where they live moves to a different rhythm altogether. A photographer by training, Ross brings to his work an imagist's appreciation for color, composition, and the "luminous detail," producing a tone poem to a rural black experience we have grown accustomed to never seeing on screen. The result is an achingly beautiful portrait of everyday life—and one of the more compelling statements about race to come out of the movies in quite some time.