Virginia Film Festival

In his directorial debut, award-winning photographer and director RaMell Ross offers a refreshingly direct approach to documentary filmmaking that fills in the gaps between individual black male icons. Hale County This Morning, This Evening follows 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 film 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.

This screening is part of our 2019 VAFF at Violet Crown series.