Hale County This Morning, This Evening
July 17th, 2019

Courtesy of Cinema Guild:

An inspired and intimate portrait of a place and its people, Hale County This Morning, This Evening looks at the lives of Daniel Collins and Quincy Bryant, two young African American men from rural Hale County, Alabama, over the course of five years. Collins attends college in search of opportunity while Bryant becomes a father to an energetic son in an open-ended, poetic form that privileges the patiently observed interstices of their lives. The audience is invited to experience the mundane and monumental, birth and death, the quotidian and the sublime. These moments combine to communicate the region’s deep culture and provide glimpses of the complex ways the African American community’s collective image is integrated into America’s visual imagination.

In his directorial debut, award-winning photographer and director RaMell Ross offers a refreshingly direct approach to documentary that fills in the gaps between individual black male icons. 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 offering a testament to dreaming despite the odds.

Tidbits:

• Sundance Film Festival – 2018 – Winner: U.S. Documentary Special Jury Award for Creative Vision
• Gotham Awards – 2018 – Winner: Best Documentary
• International Documentary Association – 2018 – Nominee: Best Feature & Best Editing
• International Documentary Association – 2018 – Winner: Best Music Score
• Independent Spirit Awards – 2019 – Nominee: Best Documentary
• Directors Guild of America – 2019 – Nominee: Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Documentary
• Academy Awards – 2019 – Nominee: Best Documentary Feature

Courtesy of website:

RaMell Ross is a filmmaker, photographer and writer. His photographs have been exhibited around the world and in the US most recently at a solo exhibition at Aperture Foundation in New York and in the landmark exhibition “New Southern Photography” at the Ogden Museum in New Orleans. His writing has appeared in such outlets as The New York Times, Film Quarterly and the Walker Arts Center. In 2015, he was selected as one of Filmmaker Magazine’s “25 New Faces of Independent Film” and as a New Frontier Artist in Residence at the MIT Media Lab. In 2016, he was a finalist for the Aperture Portfolio Prize, winner of an Aaron Siskind Individual Photographer’s Fellowship and a Sundance Art of Nonfiction Fellow. In 2017, he was selected for Rhode Island Foundation’s Robert and Margaret Maccoll Johnson Artist Fellowship. RaMell’s debut feature documentary HALE COUNTY THIS MORNING, THIS EVENING won a Special Jury Prize for Creative Vision at its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in 2018 and has since gone on to secure international theatrical, broadcast and streaming distribution as well as garnering multiple awards at top tier film festivals. The film was nominated for two IDA awards and five Cinema Eye Honors. The film won the Gotham Award for Best Documentary and the Cinema Eye Honor for Outstanding Achievement in Nonfiction Feature Filmmaking and is now nominated for the ICS, Independent Spirit Award and DGA Documentary Award. RaMell is currently on faculty at Brown University’s Visual Arts Department and recently completed his first short film, EASTER SNAP, which is premiering at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival.

Filmography:

• Easter Snap (2019) (short)
• Hale County This Morning, This Evening (2018)

Here is a curated selection of links shared on our Facebook page for additional insight/information:

• 7/16/19 – “It’s not every day that you witness a new cinematic language being born, but watching RaMell Ross’s evocatively titled documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening qualifies.” Bilge Ebiri, The Village Voice – link
• 7/16/19 – RaMell Ross’ Oscar-nominated documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening picked up another award notice this morning with an Emmy nomination for “Exceptional Merit in Documentary Filmmaking” – link