Event Archives

Hale County This Morning, This Evening

SP2 Social Justice and Arts Integration Initiative and Slought

November 12, 2018
Zellerbach Theatre
Guest Events
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Slought and the SP2 Social Justice and Arts Integration Initiative at the University of Pennsylvania are pleased to present a special screening of Hale County This Morning, This Evening (2018). It will be followed by a conversation with actor Danny Glover and producer Joslyn Barnes, co-founders of Louverture Films, and Robb Moss, a member of the edit team, moderated by legal scholar Patricia J. Williams. Read more on the speakers >>

This event is free and open to the public. Registration is requested but seating is first come, first served. Register now >>

About the Film:

How does one express the reality of individuals whose public image, lives, and humanity originate in exploitation? In Hale County This Morning, This Evening, photographer and filmmaker RaMell Ross employs the integrity of nonfiction filmmaking and the currency of stereotypical imagery to fill in the gaps between individual black male icons. The film is a lyrical innovation to the form of portraiture that boldly ruptures racist aesthetic frameworks that have historically constricted the expression of African American men on film.

Composed of intimate and unencumbered moments of people in a community, Hale County This Morning, This Evening 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 - despite the odds. In the lives of protagonists Daniel and Quincy, quotidian moments and the surrounding southern landscape are given importance, drawing poetic comparisons between historical symbols and the African American banal. Images are woven together to replace narrative arc with visual movements. As Ross crafts an inspired tapestry made up of time, the human soul, history, environmental wonder, sociology, and cosmic phenomena, a new aesthetic framework emerges that offers a new way of seeing and experiencing the heat, and the hearts of people in the Black Belt region of the U.S. as well far beyond.

About the Film Series, No Mud, No Lotus:

Hale County This Morning, This Evening serves as the opening night of No Mud, No Lotus, a screening series in collaboration with Louverture Films from November 12, 2018 through February 21, 2019. This fourteen-week retrospective features a series of twelve full-length screenings and related discussions with filmmakers at partner institutions across Philadelphia. Learn more about No Mud, No Lotus >>

Performances

The screening is presented in partnership with the Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts, the Department of Fine Arts and the Howard A. Silverstein and Patricia Bleznak Silverstein Photography Lecture Series in the School of Design, and the Cinema & Media Studies Program and the Center for Africana Studies in the School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania.

Photo credit: Film still, Hale County, This Morning, This Evening (2018). © RaMell Ross.