Quartile rating: 6.5/10 · 1 rating
Composed of intimate and unencumbered moments of people in a community, this film is constructed in a form that allows the viewer an emotive impression of the Historic South - trumpeting the beauty of life and consequences of the social construction of race, while simultaneously a testament to dreaming.
Hale County This Morning, This Evening is a strikingly original piece of observational documentary filmmaking. RaMell Ross's cinematography is genuinely exceptional — impressionistic, lyrical, and formally daring, with images that carry poetic weight rarely seen in documentary work. The film's novelty is high: its non-narrative, associative structure and its refusal of conventional documentary rhetoric make it a singular work, more akin to an essay film or visual poem than a traditional doc. Acting is not really applicable in the traditional sense, but the naturalistic presence of the subjects is quietly powerful. The plot — or rather the absence of one — is both a strength and a limitation; viewers seeking narrative coherence will find little, which pulls the plot score down. The ending, while appropriately understated, doesn't fully resolve the emotional threads the film opens, leaving the experience feeling somewhat incomplete rather than deliberately open.