The breakthrough photographer-and-filmmaker behind this year’s inventive literary adaptation Nickel Boys, co-written with Joslyn Barnes, first broke onto the film scene with his intimate documentary about Black families in central Alabama. The Oscar–nominated Hale County This Morning, This Evening is an impressive feat of portraiture — mostly shot in first-person and informed by Ross’ experience living and working in the region.

Filmed over the course of five years, Hale County This Morning, This Evening is made up of several quotidian scenes — some commonplace, others unexpected, all extraordinary in their own way. The unhurried pace of the film slowly reveals narrative developments in an organic fashion, with Ross’ unique editing style lending each event a surprising edge. 

“I was there looking and being present and wanted to make a film that was made up of moments. Made up of the sort of beautiful nuances that are banal and epic simultaneously, that every person in the world has and participates in.” RAMELL ROSS

 

Ross started taking photos of the Hale County community between 2009 and 2012, when he was teaching in a youth program and coaching basketball. But, these are not photos that he shows; instead, he’s said they helped him understand how to photograph the community around him. After a brief break, during which Ross enrolled in graduate school, he returned to Hale County and started filming. He considers the time he spent in Hale County meeting people and figuring out how to photograph them the reason why he was able to make his documentary.

RaMell Ross was born in Frankfurt, Germany, in 1982, but grew up in Fairfax, Virginia. He studied English and sociology at Georgetown, where he also played on the university’s basketball team. He later earned a Master of Fine Arts in photography from the Rhode Island School of Design and now works as an Associate Professor of Visual Art at Brown University. In 2015, he was named among Filmmaker Magazine’s “25 New Faces of Independent Film” and participated in the Sundance Institute’s New Frontier Artist in Residence at the MIT Media Lab. His latest film, an adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Nickel Boys produced with Plan B (Moonlight, Okja, If Beale Street Could Talk) and Orion, premiered at this year’s Telluride Film Festival and has earned Ross awards for Best Director at both the Gotham Awards and the New York Film Critics Circle Awards. 

Text written by Nicolas Pedrero-Setzer. Special thanks to Cinema Guild.