Hale County This Morning, This Evening facts for kids

Quick facts for kids Hale County This Morning, This Evening
Film poster
Directed by	RaMell Ross
Produced by	RaMell Ross Joslyn Barnes Su Kim
Written by	RaMell Ross Maya Krinsky
Starring	Latrenda "Boosie" Ash Quincy Bryant Daniel Collins
Music by	Scott Alario Forest Kelley Alex Somers
Editing by	RaMell Ross Joslyn Barnes Maya Krinsky Robb Moss
Distributed by	The Cinema Guild
Release date(s)	January 19, 2018 (2018-01-19) (Sundance Film Festival)
Running time	76 minutes
Country	United States
Language	English
Money made	$112,300

Hale County This Morning, This Evening is a 2018 American documentary film about the lives of black people in Hale County, Alabama. It is directed by RaMell Ross and produced by RaMell Ross, Joslyn Barnes, Su Kim, and is Ross's first nonfiction feature. The documentary is the winner of 2018 Sundance Film Festival award for U.S. Documentary Special Jury Award for Creative Vision, 2018 Gotham Independent Film Award for Best Documentary Feature and the Cinema Eye Honors Outstanding Achievement in Nonfiction Feature Filmmaking. It was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. After its theatrical run, it aired on the PBS series Independent Lens and eventually won a 2020 Peabody Award.

Summary

Lacking a linear storyline, Hale County This Morning, This Evening follows various inhabitants of Hale County in Alabama's Black Belt. Questions posited throughout as intertitles loosely structure the film. They are: “What is the orbit of our dreaming?”, “How do we not frame someone?” and “Whose child is this?” Ross shared a list in Filmmaker Magazine of nonhierarchical aims and corresponding strategies to shape the film's avant-garde form including 'to centralize my new community in documentary's language of truth' and then to 'participate, not capture; shoot from not at' the community. The result is a non-fiction work that has the qualities of a visual orchestra, the 76 minute film following "the flow of five musical movements, as (Quincy) Bryant and (Daniel) Collins float in and out of frame, their lives progressing through college and fatherhood" Important to Ross' imagery in the film and his art practice is what he calls the epic-banal, "the magnificence of the universe’s encasement in the social, awaiting other forms", which he says is "the direct result of looking at photography and film in the context of representation and lack of representation... its tendency to sensationalize". The epic-banal is "an epic moment in something incredibly simple" that something can be profound, grandiose and deeply meaningful in the simple depictions of existence of Black people.

RaMell Ross said of the movie: "If we weren't stuck in our first-person points of view, I would argue that most problems in the world that have to do with inequality would be solved, because we wouldn't be stuck in our single points of views."

Accolades

See also

In Spanish: Hale County esta mañana, esta noche para niños

• List of black films of the 2010s
• Hale County, Alabama
• Godfrey Reggio- whose Qatsi trilogy documentaries were the inspiration for this film