recontextualizing the black south — free game from ramell ross
There is a scene in Hale County This Morning, This Evening where a young toddler, Kyrie, is running in circles between a living room and hallway — his movement resembling something between a light jog and infantile waddling. The camera follows him panning right to left, with a blurry TV and the legs of Kyrie’s parents, Quincy and Boosie, lounging in sofa chairs as the backdrop. But the focus is Kyrie, letting out soft grunts and deep breaths as he playfully paces from end to end.
This scene plays for over three minutes, uninterrupted, epitomizing the tone of Hale County — a documentary that is patient, understated, and challenging while leaving blank space for interpretation.
But mostly it is a film that gives plenty of time to sit and observe. A rarity for most Black subjects on camera.
The biggest revelation to me is that the traditional process of making films doesn't lend itself towards gathering moments that are this unique. The film was difficult to edit, but the moments that were selected were easy to stumble upon because it was a time-based process of waiting for moments that were so personally indelible that they had to be in the film.
That’s Ramell Ross. To call him the director of Hale County feels inaccurate if not simply an understatement. Ramell is a photographer, filmmaker, and educator native to northern Virginia. Out of sheer luck he landed in the rural town of Hale County, Alabama where he ended up living and working for eight years as a basketball coach and GED instructor.
I had a friend that was going to Hale County to consult on this two-week art project and he asked if I wanted to come. When I went, a job opened up in a youth program and I was also teaching a photo course for the two weeks. But I was like, man, I'd live here. I was going crazy into debt, photographing in D.C. I couldn't afford the rent and freelancing wasn't really lucrative. And I said [the South] is the place where I can gather my thoughts, pay off some debt. And this place is beautiful and interesting.
Over that time, Ramell developed an intimate and personal connection with the people and places of Hale County — an area whose vernacular architecture and rural landscapes have also been immortalized through the photography of Walker Evans (1941) and artwork of William Christenberry (1960s-2000s).
Ramell spent five of his years there documenting Black life, building on that previous seminal work by bringing an unassuming visual honesty to Hale County’s Black community and bodies, all through the use of a single handheld DSLR camera.
The result was over 1,300 hours of footage that Ramell distilled into a 76-minute feature — one that occupies a unique space between documentary, sociological exploration and experimental art.
Ramell’s approach rejects traditional narrative structure and instead opts for a collection of nuanced moments both epic and banal that speak individually and sing collectively.
I knew there was a collective power to decontextualized images of people like myself because of the way in which our image has been built over time through images. … Being [in the South] you realize that it's a fairly unknown daily existence, specifically through media because of its history and just the way that it's visually represented. It's represented in cliches.
The film, which received an Academy nomination after its release in 2018, stands out due to its unassuming nature. It tends to be common practice in documentary filmmaking — whether a collection of sit-down interviews or a “gritty” Vice documentary — to impose a mode of thinking onto an audience. Where it becomes apparent that the person behind the camera is often looking through the lens to affirm their own implicit bias.
As Ramell says...
A portrait is as much a portrait of the photographer as it is the person who's in front of the camera.
Hale County flips that approach on its head. Ramell has a genuine care for how they are presented. The camera feels more like a companion than a voyeur, humanizing the people in front of it in a manner that can’t be replicated without Ramell’s deep connection to his subjects and the South itself.
When you make films that show folks making decisions, failing and succeeding, then you allow the viewer to cast judgment on them. You individualize them to the point where you don't question the system that put them in a position to make those decisions. You question the person who is choosing whether or not to go to school, or to feel that and not feel this, when we can create a world in which those decisions aren't even there.
At the center of the film are Daniel Collins and Quincy Bryant, two teenage boys entering semi-adulthood with hoop and football dreams whose lives take unexpected detours — mostly beyond their control — over the five years Ramell spent with them.
Daniel and Quincy’s families have resided in Hale County for generations and the two boys are next in line, hoping to break a generational trend of dreams often deferred.
As Daniel, Quincy, and the people around them experience love, loss, hope, grief, the film becomes as much about their lives as it does a commentary on the systemic constraints imposed by the South and the race we are all running against time itself.
Just coming from a different social context, different type of education, different everything I'm like, oh shit, you guys are brilliant. You guys can do anything. [But] you realize that the way in which the education system is built there, it produces a very specific spectrum of people. And so you end up having to adjust all of your expectations.
Like you want to go into a school and say you can be anything that you want. But that's a long road, you know? … And unless you're willing to spend every single moment of your life ensuring that they make all the right decisions in their own house, or when they're with their friends, they're going to fall into the statistical trajectory that their local reality produces.
Hale County is a movie that shifts how you think. It’s a film that is continuously dissecting itself, posing questions it doesn’t claim to have an immediate answer to and presenting new ones with each viewing. I’ve seen it about eight times now. With every watch, there are scenes that feel trivial on the surface, like the one with Kyrie mentioned up top, that become deeper metaphors for time and what we do within the walls imposed on us.
Ramell’s approach from behind the camera brings a visual justice to Black being, granting Black subjects a patience, honesty and uninhibited nuance that is rarely offered in cinema. It changed the way I see people and comprehend existence itself. And more than anything, it is a beautiful watch.
My whole thing was like, how do we just make the film so that someone can make it through it? Like, who cares if they know the conceptual underpinnings or the grand theory of strategic formalism. If they can make it through, then I can't imagine that someone would go outside and see a young Black man or a young Black woman or themselves as a person of color, I can’t imagine they will look at those things the same.
This scene plays for over three minutes, uninterrupted, epitomizing the tone of Hale County — a documentary that is patient, understated, and challenging while leaving blank space for interpretation.
But mostly it is a film that gives plenty of time to sit and observe. A rarity for most Black subjects on camera.
The biggest revelation to me is that the traditional process of making films doesn't lend itself towards gathering moments that are this unique. The film was difficult to edit, but the moments that were selected were easy to stumble upon because it was a time-based process of waiting for moments that were so personally indelible that they had to be in the film.
That’s Ramell Ross. To call him the director of Hale County feels inaccurate if not simply an understatement. Ramell is a photographer, filmmaker, and educator native to northern Virginia. Out of sheer luck he landed in the rural town of Hale County, Alabama where he ended up living and working for eight years as a basketball coach and GED instructor.
I had a friend that was going to Hale County to consult on this two-week art project and he asked if I wanted to come. When I went, a job opened up in a youth program and I was also teaching a photo course for the two weeks. But I was like, man, I'd live here. I was going crazy into debt, photographing in D.C. I couldn't afford the rent and freelancing wasn't really lucrative. And I said [the South] is the place where I can gather my thoughts, pay off some debt. And this place is beautiful and interesting.
Over that time, Ramell developed an intimate and personal connection with the people and places of Hale County — an area whose vernacular architecture and rural landscapes have also been immortalized through the photography of Walker Evans (1941) and artwork of William Christenberry (1960s-2000s).
Ramell spent five of his years there documenting Black life, building on that previous seminal work by bringing an unassuming visual honesty to Hale County’s Black community and bodies, all through the use of a single handheld DSLR camera.
The result was over 1,300 hours of footage that Ramell distilled into a 76-minute feature — one that occupies a unique space between documentary, sociological exploration and experimental art.
Ramell’s approach rejects traditional narrative structure and instead opts for a collection of nuanced moments both epic and banal that speak individually and sing collectively.
I knew there was a collective power to decontextualized images of people like myself because of the way in which our image has been built over time through images. … Being [in the South] you realize that it's a fairly unknown daily existence, specifically through media because of its history and just the way that it's visually represented. It's represented in cliches.
The film, which received an Academy nomination after its release in 2018, stands out due to its unassuming nature. It tends to be common practice in documentary filmmaking — whether a collection of sit-down interviews or a “gritty” Vice documentary — to impose a mode of thinking onto an audience. Where it becomes apparent that the person behind the camera is often looking through the lens to affirm their own implicit bias.
As Ramell says...
A portrait is as much a portrait of the photographer as it is the person who's in front of the camera.
Hale County flips that approach on its head. Ramell has a genuine care for how they are presented. The camera feels more like a companion than a voyeur, humanizing the people in front of it in a manner that can’t be replicated without Ramell’s deep connection to his subjects and the South itself.
When you make films that show folks making decisions, failing and succeeding, then you allow the viewer to cast judgment on them. You individualize them to the point where you don't question the system that put them in a position to make those decisions. You question the person who is choosing whether or not to go to school, or to feel that and not feel this, when we can create a world in which those decisions aren't even there.
At the center of the film are Daniel Collins and Quincy Bryant, two teenage boys entering semi-adulthood with hoop and football dreams whose lives take unexpected detours — mostly beyond their control — over the five years Ramell spent with them.
Daniel and Quincy’s families have resided in Hale County for generations and the two boys are next in line, hoping to break a generational trend of dreams often deferred.
As Daniel, Quincy, and the people around them experience love, loss, hope, grief, the film becomes as much about their lives as it does a commentary on the systemic constraints imposed by the South and the race we are all running against time itself.
Just coming from a different social context, different type of education, different everything I'm like, oh shit, you guys are brilliant. You guys can do anything. [But] you realize that the way in which the education system is built there, it produces a very specific spectrum of people. And so you end up having to adjust all of your expectations.
Like you want to go into a school and say you can be anything that you want. But that's a long road, you know? … And unless you're willing to spend every single moment of your life ensuring that they make all the right decisions in their own house, or when they're with their friends, they're going to fall into the statistical trajectory that their local reality produces.
Hale County is a movie that shifts how you think. It’s a film that is continuously dissecting itself, posing questions it doesn’t claim to have an immediate answer to and presenting new ones with each viewing. I’ve seen it about eight times now. With every watch, there are scenes that feel trivial on the surface, like the one with Kyrie mentioned up top, that become deeper metaphors for time and what we do within the walls imposed on us.
Ramell’s approach from behind the camera brings a visual justice to Black being, granting Black subjects a patience, honesty and uninhibited nuance that is rarely offered in cinema. It changed the way I see people and comprehend existence itself. And more than anything, it is a beautiful watch.
My whole thing was like, how do we just make the film so that someone can make it through it? Like, who cares if they know the conceptual underpinnings or the grand theory of strategic formalism. If they can make it through, then I can't imagine that someone would go outside and see a young Black man or a young Black woman or themselves as a person of color, I can’t imagine they will look at those things the same.