Hale County This Morning This Evening
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The Carrier Bag Theory of Nonfiction Filmmaking: What Documentarians Can Learn from Ursula K. Le Guin
I teach documentary studies and production at the Skidmore College MDOCS program and run the MDOCS Storytellers’ Institute. When non-tenure track faculty recently organized to form a union, MDOCS curated a series of labor-related films to add to the conversation around labor organizing on campus. What should have been a fun project became increasingly frustrating because all the documentaries we found centered strikes—the most conflict-oriented, high-stakes and visible side of unionization. What we wanted to feature were the less-visible processes of labor organizing: meetings, conversations, collaborations and negotiations. We ended up screening two excellent films about striking workers, and although the screening generated […]
by Sarah Ema Friedland on Dec 15, 2022 -
“Black Life Has Always Been Better Than Black Cinema”: Documentary Makers Speak at Full Frame’s “Black Frame: New Voices of Documentary” A&E IndieFilms Speakeasy
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The 2010s in 10 Double Features
“I can’t commit to a movie.” In the era of limitless streaming “content,” no phrase has more irrevocably warped our viewing habits. If a single film now represents a commitment, then a double feature might as well be a back-to-back life-sentence. Why trudge through all that first-act boredom, after all, when you’re already so behind on The Good Place? Despite the siren song of bingeable TV, the dual bill holds strong as a way to burn a night at the movies. Art-house theaters, digital programmers, and genre festivals still love them, as does any cinephile looking to hunker down with […]
by Soheil Rezayazdi on Dec 30, 2019 -
“It’s Like Having a Diary Shot by Someone Else of Moments That You Don’t Remember….”: RaMell Ross on his Oscar-nominated Hale County This Morning, This Evening
Nominated for the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature, and airing on PBS’s Independent Lens beginning February 11th (and now on iTunes), RaMell Ross’s Hale County This Morning, This Evening lives up to its buzz and then some. The award-winning photographer’s debut feature is a low-key, highly cinematic look at the Alabama Black Belt over a period of five years. In that time Ross trained his lens mostly on two twenty-something men, Daniel and Quincy, as they navigated education, blue-collar labor, fatherhood, and just the intricacies of daily life in their culturally rich, economically impoverished Southern town. Filmmaker was fortunate enough […]
by Lauren Wissot on Feb 8, 2019 -
A Cut in Time: RaMell Ross, Joslyn Barnes and Maya Krinsky Break Down a Scene from Hale County This Morning, This Evening
“The discovering began after I moved to Alabama in 2009 to teach photography and coach basketball. Photographing in my day-to-day, I began filming using time to figure out how we’ve come to be seen.” — RaMell Ross, Hale County This Morning, This Evening The film Hale County This Morning, This Evening defies easy summary. It’s an ontological inquiry: a pushback against dominant narratives of what it means to be black in the historic South, an invitation to the African American diaspora to return to its roots and participate in the reimaging of blackness. It’s also a poetic exaltation of two young […]
by Genevieve Jacobson on Sep 17, 2018 -
Garrett Scott: A Legacy of Generosity at Full Frame Documentary Festival
In 2006, documentary filmmaker Garrett Scott died unexpectedly, shocking the film community. His film, Occupation: Dreamland, co-directed with Ian Olds, won the Independent Spirit Truer than Fiction Award two days after his death. In the aftermath of this tragedy, his friends and collaborators founded the Garrett Scott Documentary Development Grant. The idea of the grant is to support first-time feature documentary makers by emulating a formative experience Garrett and Ian had when making Occupation: Dreamland. He visited Full Frame Documentary Film Festival in Durham, North Carolina, where he met with many people from the doc community. Full Frame is a […]
by Jason Osder on May 10, 2018 -
Sundance 2018 Critic’s Notebook, Day 2: Clara’s Ghost, Hale County This Morning, This Evening
