Visiting Filmmakers Series Online: RaMell Ross, director of Hale County This Morning, This Evening
Thursday, April 30, 2020 1:30 PM to 3:00 PM EDT
Online Location
RaMell Ross is a visual artist, photographer, and writer based in Rhode Island and Alabama.
His work has appeared in places like the NY Times, Aperture, Harper’s Magazine, TIME, Oxford American, and the Walker Arts Center. He has been awarded an Aaron Siskind Foundation Individual Photographer’s Fellowship and a Rhode Island Foundation MacColl Johnson artist fellowship. He recently had a solo exhibition at Aperture Gallery in NY.
His feature documentary - and first film - Hale County This Morning, This Evening won a Special Jury Award for Creative Vision at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival, was nominated for an Oscar at the 91st Academy Awards and has screened at Museum of Modern Art, National Gallery of Art, Hammer Museum, Institute of Contemporary Art - London, Museum of Moving Image, and Lincoln Center. RaMell double majored in English and Sociology at Georgetown University and teaches in Brown University’s Visual Art Department. Images from South County, AL (a Hale County) and new work will be displayed in a solo exhibition at the Ogden Museum in late 2020.
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.
Here is a link to RaMell's remarkable 2019 short film, Easter Snap, available on Field of Vision.
Background materials:
RaMell Ross on the Katsi trilogy.
RaMell Ross on The Daily Show:
RaMell Ross on PBS News Hour:
Leonardo Goi, "The God of the Camera is a Colonizer: Interview with RaMell Ross", Senses of Cinema July 2019
Eric Hynes, "Sundance Interview with RaMell Ross 2018", Film Comment Feb 1, 2018
Max Fraser, "Filming the Black Belt: An Interview with RaMell Ross," Dissent Magazine Fall 2019
Samantha N. Sheppard, "The Documentary That Bucks Oscar Trends—And Still Got a Nomination," The Atlantic Feb 19, 2019
Our event is sponsored by Film and Video Studies, African and African American Studies, Global Affairs, Global Programs, History and Art History, CHSS, CVPA, University Life, School of Art, Women and Gender Studies, Art and Visual Technology, CVPA's Kritikos Series: Arts in Context, Film and Media Studies, the American Studies Program at Georgetown University, and Delta Kappa Alpha.
For more information:
Samantha Beach, Office Manager, Film at Mason, sbeach2@gmu.edu
Cynthia Fuchs, Director, Visiting Filmmakers Series at Mason cfuchs@gmu.edu
