76' 2018 USA director: RaMell Ross cinematography: RaMell Ross editing: RaMell Ross production: Louverture Films
The Deep South of the United States
RaMell Ross’s full-length debut is one of the most unusual and intriguing documentary films to have been nominated for an Oscar in recent years. The director discusses key issues in the history and contemporary life of African Americans in an extraordinarly thoughtful way, building an intimate, largely self-referential portrait of the population of several thousand residents of Hale County, Alabama, in the Deep South of the United States. Ross is as familiar as anybody with the hateful stereotypes rooted in collective identity. In documenting everyday life—his own and that of his neighbors—he deconstructs cultural clichés and offers viewers a vision of Hale devoid of sensation and sentimentality, as he conducts a dialogue with the works of James Baldwin, Richard Wright, and Toni Morrison.
