This week we’re excited to present an archival conversation from 2020 with Academy Award-nominated filmmaker RaMell Ross, moderated by Academy Award-nominated filmmaker Garrett Bradley (Time). The two discuss Ross’s documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening, which was a 2018 New Directors/New Film selection. Ross’s next feature, Nickel Boys, an adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, will open the 62nd New York Film Festival on September 27. 

“The American stranger knows Blackness as a fact—even though it is fiction,” says writer-director RaMell Ross. For his visionary and political debut feature, Ross spent five years intimately observing African-American families living in Hale County, Alabama. It’s a region made unforgettable by Walker Evans and James Agee’s landmark 1941 photographic essay, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, which documented the impoverished lives of white sharecropper families in Alabama’s Dust Bowl during the Great Depression. Ross’s poetic return to this place shows changed demographics and depicts people resilient in the face of adversity and invisibility. An Oscar nominee for Best Documentary Feature, Hale County This Morning, This Evening introduces a distinct and powerful new voice in American filmmaking.