‘Hale County’ Trailer: Sundance Award-Winning Doc Examines Lives Of Two Kids From Rural Alabama

What moments are used to represent a place? What moments are used to represent a character?

In a film brought to you by Executive Producer Danny Glover and award-winning photographer and director RaMell Ross, these questions are two that the documentary “Hale County This Morning, This Evening” examines.

Winner of the Special Jury Award for Creative Vision at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival, this film follows the lives of two African American men, Daniel Collins and Quincy Bryant, in Hale County, Alabama.  Hale County sits in the black belt of Alabama; the “black belt” is a large section of land that stretches from Texas to Virginia and is where the majority of slave plantations were once located in the South. This is where Ross met the film’s protagonists, the aforementioned Collins and Bryant.

READ MORE: You Haven’t Seen Anything Quite Like ‘Hale County This Morning, This Evening’ Before [Sundance Review]

When asked how the idea of the film came about, Ross stated (via press notes), “The idea for the film started small and grew through a series of ‘ah-ha, oh-no, ah-ha, oh-no’ moments. During the filming and thinking process, an underlying interest of mine resuscitated itself: to investigate the ‘return to home’ of a Northern Black American.”

“My large format photography was already invested in the exploration of this particular perspective and the film and its form emerged from that critical inquiry. I eventually knew that I wanted to make a film that looked closely at vast stretches of Quincy and Daniel’s lives and to witness the ephemera of the human project– the latter in the context of the Historic South, the origin of Black American aesthetics, and in that–I wanted to make a film that formally and conceptually strove toward engaging the visual complexity of being Black,” he continued.

“Hale County This Morning, This Evening” is set to open September 14.

Here is the official synopsis and trailer:

An inspired and intimate portrait of a place and its people, HALE COUNTY THIS MORNING, THIS EVENING looks at the lives of 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 form 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.