The award-winning experimental documentary “Hale County This Morning, This Evening” by director RaMell Ross screened at the Princeton Garden Theatre on Feb. 25 as part of the venue’s Black History Month programming in partnership with the Princeton YWCA.
The documentary follows two subjects in Hale County, Alabama, in the South’s Black Belt region.
Daniel is a young Black man focused on playing basketball and the opportunities the sport can provide. He attends Selma University, plays on the school’s basketball team and dreams of a career in the sport.
The other principal subject is a young Black man named Quincy, who is focused on raising a family with his partner Boosie. At the beginning of the film, Quincy and Boosie welcome their first son, Kyrie. Later Boosie gives birth to twins Karmen and Korbyn via caesarean section, with Quincy by her side. Tragically, the couple lose Korbyn to sudden infant death syndrome.
While depictions of Black people on film often dwell on tragedy, Ross’ film takes a different approach. The College of New Jersey professor Samira Abdur-Rahman, Ph.D., who led the Q&A, called the film “a meditation.” She said, “I think we’ve seen a Black church service, right? I think we’ve seen Black people playing basketball.”
Though only about a dozen people attended the 7 p.m. midweek showing, most of the audience stayed for the question-and-answer session afterward.
“Hale County” also eschews common narrative tools audiences expect in a documentary, including a narrator and traditional interviews, to compose a vignette of life for Black residents of Hale County, Alabama.
Instead, Ross draws from the discipline of photography, in which he earned a Master of Fine Arts from the Rhode Island School of Design. Nearly every frame in the 76-minute film seems artfully composed, enough to warrant being a framed photograph.
Ross is also a published writer, with pieces in Oxford American as well as The New York Times’ Lens column.
In “Hale County,” Ross uses intertitles — white text against a black screen — to organize the footage he selected from approximately 1,300 hours he shot, as Ross said in an interview with No Film School.
Mostly, these are questions: “What is the orbit of our dreaming?”, “How do we not frame someone?” and “Whose child is this?”
The cost for the Garden Theatre to screen the film was a flat fee of $250, paid to the film’s distributor, according to Brendan Joyce, co-director of programming for the Garden and Renew Theaters, which manages the Garden.
Dr. Abdur-Rahman declined the honorarium usually offered by the YWCA for leading the discussion, the YW’s director of mission advancement Brigitte Jean-Louis said and Abdur-Rahman confirmed.
Julia Mahony, director of educational programming for the Garden and Renew, said: “You’re always taking a chance if you’re doing a title that isn’t as well known, but I still think it’s just as important to take those chances, even if it’s just a smaller group of people, but in general they’re pretty successful.”
“Hale County” is the fourth film the Princeton YWCA and Garden have presented together. The YW’s Jean-Louis said: “It started in April 2023 with a showing of ‘The Price of Silence’,” which is a documentary about the often overlooked subject of enslaved people in New Jersey. “We’ve really just grown from there,” Jean-Louis said.
Mahony said, “After ‘The Price of Silence’ was Spike Lee’s ‘Malcolm X’. And then last year we did a movie called ‘Alma’s Rainbow’, which is not as well known.”
‘Alma’s Rainbow’ is a celebrated coming-of-age tale released in 1994 from Black and Philadelphia-born filmmaker Ayoka Chenzira. During the conversation after the film, Jean-Louis said the next film presented by the partnership could be RaMell Ross’ second film “Nickel Boys”, a narrative feature film based on Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel.
The Garden’s Brendan Joyce said, “I think the success is based on the fact that we’re collaborating with the YWCA, regardless of how many people come out, that’s a partnership and collaboration we love to keep.”
For those who missed the event, “Hale County” is currently available to watch via Kanopy, a streaming service available for free to anyone with a Mercer County library card. But watching the film with an audience of like-minded Mercer County residents is an experience that cannot be streamed.
Audience member Jacob Luckey of Lawrenceville, who has seen the film twice, said “I go to [The Garden’s] website all the time, especially for stuff like this when they are showing special screenings for stuff I have either seen or wanted to see.”
