Hale County's Oscar night

UPDATE: "Free Solo" won the Best Documentary Feature Oscar category.

When Alabama is depicted in movies, it's often through the fog and filter of West Coast sensibilities, horrifically over-drawled dialects plowing through mockery or misunderstanding. Even when Hollywood does get this stretch of the Deep South more or less right, 98 percent of the time you'll find the film was actually shot in Georgia, Louisiana, the Carolinas, or as in the 1962 "To Kill a Mockingbird," on Burbank soundstages.

But one of tonight's Academy Award-nominated movies captures beautifully, in varying tints and shades and moods, not just a true Alabama, but more specifically this region, deep into the Black Belt. RaMell Ross spent almost a decade living and working as a basketball coach and photography teacher in Greensboro, in the process gradually capturing on film, and editing together from 1,300 hours of footage "Hale County This Morning, This Evening," which is up for a Best Documentary Feature Oscar.

Ross worked in a youth program for three years before he even began filming, then spent five more years filming ordinary people, going about ordinary life. It's unusual for a documentary in that there is no narration, not much in the way of plot or through-line, and no viewpoint other than the lens.

"My goal is to create an experience of the historic South, the experience of the centrality of the black experience," Ross said in an interview with the Los Angeles Times.

Hale, just south of Tuscaloosa, is home to a little more than 15,000 people, about 60 percent of them black. Its largest cities, Moundville and county seat Greensboro, both have populations of about 2,500. About 22 percent of families and 26 percent of the population live below the poverty level.

Ross, who attended Georgetown University on a basketball scholarship, met a pair of young men, athletes Quincy Bryant and Daniel Collins, and his film follows them and their families. But there's very little narration, perhaps not unusual for a first feature by someone better known for still photography, which has been published in The New York Times, and on book covers.

Variety's Owen Gleiberman wrote that it's an impressionistic portrait of the people and area: "The simplest way to describe 'Hale County This Morning, This Evening' — and maybe the best way, since it’s a film of elemental radiance — is to say that it’s a documentary put together like a series of photographs. In this case, the photographs are filmed images, so they in effect come to life."

It could be seen as spiritual kin to James Agee and Walker Evans' 1941 book "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men," photos and essays about impoverished tenant farmers in the Depression-era South. Evans shot largely in Hale County, in and around Akron. Collected with Agee's 30,000 words of text, originally intended as an article for Fortune magazine, the book sold poorly at first, but has since been acclaimed not just for the portrayals, but for literary and journalistic innovation.

Ross' film received more immediate praise, winning the 2018 Sundance Film Festival award for U.S. Documentary, Special Jury Award for Creative Vision. It's been picked as the year's best documentary by a number of publications, and one of 2018's best films overall by The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Film Comment and more.

It's one of five nominees for best feature-length documentary Oscar, alongside "RBG," "Free Solo," "Minding the Gap," and "Of Fathers and Sons," and has won 15 awards from film festivals and organizations across the U.S., England, Canada, France, Ireland, Denmark and Switzerland.

"Hale County This Morning, This Evening" has been called "visionary" by The Guardian and "a transcendental scrapbook" by Gleiberman. Glenn Kenny of the New York Times lauded Ross' quiet patience: "His camera’s gaze has a quality of reserve, one that insistently imparts respect to his subjects." It's a film that asks more than it answers, literally, through titles displayed on-screen: “What is the orbit of our dreaming?," “How do we not frame someone?,” and “Whose child is this?”

While it's not played at the Hollywood 16 cineplex, "Hale County This Morning, This Evening" did screen at last summer's Sidewalk Film Festival in Birmingham, and ran Feb. 16 in Central High School's auditorium as part of the Seventh Annual Tuscaloosa Africana Film Festival. David Allgood, who booked art, indie and documentary films for years with the Arts Council of Tuscaloosa's Bama Art House film series, was one of those attending.

The no-narrator approach, while unusual, worked in its favor, he said. "It was pretty compelling that way. I can't think of another documentary I've seen like that, with no narrator whatsoever, nobody asking questions."

Ross and camera — he worked as his own cinematographer — followed families and individuals living out daily routines, in school, in a basketball locker room, at a baptism, as a child in "Lego Movie" T-shirt toddles, while a blues guitarist plays under a haunting moon, or a family on the phone, taking in horrific news.

"There's one scene of a young couple with their little baby in the living room," Allgood said. "The dad's playing with the baby, watching TV, but the wife just looks totally dejected, staring off into space. And it goes on that way for some times, minutes ... maybe it's speaking to the horrible boredom of grinding poverty."

"I can't think of anything more truthtful than to just let the picture and voices tell the story."

In various interviews, Ross spoke about developing complex portraits of the people he knew and worked with, to expose the fullness of their humanity, to seek "visual justice" for the people of Hale County. In that L.A. Times interview, he disputed the notion that prejudice and racism stem from thinking of others as non-human.

“I think they think they’re inferior, and inferiority is just as dangerous as a person saying (another) person is not human," Ross said. "So for me, it’s more about connecting people to know that the similarities (between us) are rooted in something that is larger and ‘they’ are not inferior.”

To learn more about Ross and his work, see the site at www.halecountyfilm.com. The 91st Academy Awards will air live tonight, beginning at 7 p.m. Central on ABC.

Reach Mark Hughes Cobb at mark.cobb@tuscaloosanews.com or 205-722-0201.

When: 7 p.m. Sunday

Where to watch: ABC 33/40

Online

Click here to learn more about RaMell Ross and his work.

91st Academy Awards