-Welcome to the show. -Thanks for having me, Trevor.
And, I mean, first things first,
congratulations on your Oscar nomination.
Thank you.
(cheering and applause)
Your-your first documentary
-gets an Oscar nomination. -(laughs) Yeah.
That's-that's a pretty high bar for you right now.
It's pretty wild. I'm done.
-I'm finished after this. -You're done, yeah? You should.
-There's no more. -Quit while you're ahead and just be done.
-Yeah. -Um, you'll be one-for-one
-and two-for-O. -(laughs)
-Uh... (laughs) -Trump.
The, um, the film is truly beautiful.
And it's-it's difficult to capture in that clip.
I mean, if someone's watching that right now,
they'll be like, "Do I need to be high?"
-(laughs) -But...
but-but the film is a story
that you have put together.
-It took five years to film this documentary. -Yeah.
And it was a story
that really is just about being black in the South.
-Mm-hmm. -How do you even begin
to just make a documentary about... life?
Yeah, I think that's... that's the biggest challenge.
I think I realized that you just display it.
You don't sensationalize it.
You don't dramatize it.
You, you know, use the documentary genre
because it's a space where, you know,
people are sort of predisposed to truth,
-which is a great, great entryway into an idea. -Right.
And so you film black folks.
You use the black banal. You use the quotidian.
And you, um... Yeah.
And, you know, you look to, I think, the logic of music,
which is kind of counterintuitive,
and it is repetitious and has contradictions in it
to provide, like, a space of experience
so someone can actually experience
what it's like to see and be there, perhaps.
Right, because, a-a lot of the time, when somebody says,
"Oh, this is gonna be a documentary about black people
living in the South," you immediately expect conflict.
-Yeah. -There's gonna be tension.
There's gonna be racism on the surface.
It's just gonna be, like, this violent portrayal of black life.
But this is truly a story that takes place
and it takes you through an undulating journey.
It-It's calm, it's happy, it's sad.
There-there are just moments of nothing in the film.
Was that important to you, to capture black life
in the South in its entirety?
It was. It was important to-to centralize the black experience
and to centralize the black gaze.
It's something that Toni Morrison talks a lot about,
um, with her novels.
There is, uh, a fundamental,
you know, use of the camera and black folks,
where you're sort of pointing to black people as the other.
-Right. -But what happens when you reorient the camera
and you centralize our view and you're the other
and you show blackness as a default,
not something to be a spectacle or something to be--
-um, you know, tied into a narrative -Wow.
that is important and expresses a struggle
but simultaneously sort of forecloses
a greater understanding of what it is to be a human being
and to be a person of color.
Wh-When you made this film,
what-what makes it really interesting is that
you moved to Hale County.
Right? And so you were there,
and you-you lived there for a number of years
before you decided to make this documentary.
Normally, documentaries are made by people who go to a place
-to cover a story. -Yeah.
In many ways, you were telling the story
-of your adopted community. -Yeah.
Did that change how you made the film?
No, I think it just improved the ability for the film
to be an authentic display
or rendition of my experience
but then, simultaneously, the community's experience
and the negotiations be-between that
and not some sort of feigned objectivity,
um, or some feigned, um, you know,
exploration into ideas that are, fundamentally,
a sort of fantasy rela--
-you have, like, a fantasy relationship to. -Right.
And, yeah, I think...
I think that's the most beautiful part,
is that it was my life with their life
that allows you to participate in both of those
until there's just genuine, sort of,
collectivity in the-- in the piece.
You-you follow two subjects,
um, whom I believe you met at a basketball camp, right?
-Uh, kind of. -And-- Kind of.
-Kind of in that-- in that world. -Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Right. And, um, y-you know,
wh-what's interesting is, because it's a journey
that takes place over five years, this is the way I felt
about it when I was-- when I was watching the film.
It feels like...
-a photo album that has come to life. -Mm.
You know when you flip through someone's photo album,
and you-you see, "Oh, this was when you were a baby.
And this is when this happened, this..."
That's-that's really what the film feels like.
It doesn't feel like a linear storytelling.
We're jumping through time and space.
The pictures are moving.
It's-it's really a photographer's portrayal
-of a film in my opinion. -Yeah.
But what's interesting is, there are moments in the film
where you are... you are in the grittiest piece
-of a person's life. -Mm-hmm.
I mean, there's one point where you are at the funeral
-of a toddler. -Mm-hmm.
How do you capture those moments
without feeling like you're overstepping boundaries?
Well, you know, the moments of the funeral
and-and, you know, how they're displayed
in the films are the only footage I have of it,
-because I wasn't interested in filming the footage. -Right.
You know, I-I was there as a support, um, you know,
person for this really tragic thing that happened.
And so, you know, the shots are really distant,
and, you know, it happens in the film,
and then you sort of move on,
because the film isn't about the struggle.
It's not about the trauma of the situation.
It's something that happened, but it's not something
-that the film is necessarily about. -Right.
And I think, you know, in terms of the photographic approach,
you know, the South is kind of the-the conceptual home
for the black image, and for black men
and for black women and for black people.
And so, taking a photographic approach allows you
to participate in, you know, the documentary genre
with a sort of enhanced complexity
-with... of the moment. -Right.
You know, normally, films are sort of building off moments
and scenes in order to prove some thesis
or prove some narrative.
But what happens when you make every frame
and every moment the most important moment
that's packed with ideas
and packed with the ambiguity necessary to really deal
with the contradiction of being blackness?
Um, yeah, I think it's an interesting thing
to just compound meaning as much as possible,
and sort of see what kind of experience, um, emerges.
When people watch
this film, they're gonna have many different takeaways.
Some people will say it's beautiful.
Some people will say it's-it's enlightening,
it's calming, it's-it's a different experience.
As the filmmaker, what do you hope they would take away
that maybe you haven't seen people taking away?
You know, I genuinely hope
that people have an actual experience.
I think... Well, I mean, I believe
that experience is before words.
It's, like, before knowledge.
You sort of apply the narrative after.
You apply meaning after.
And so, you know, the film is rigorously made.
And with that in mind,
if someone can make it through the film,
have an experience of what it's like
to look through my eyes through their lives,
then, they'll have an experience of the centrality
of our gaze, and hopefully, um,
that provides some new input or some new understanding
of, um... of me and them and the world.
-Thank you so much for being on the show. -Yeah.
A truly, truly amazing film.
Hale County This Morning, This Evening is currently
in select theatres.
You can also stream the film on PBS.com or buy it on iTunes.
RaMell Ross, everybody.