On April 30, 2020, the Visiting Filmmakers Series featured RaMell Ross, a visual artist, photographer, and writer based in Rhode Island and Alabama. His work has appeared in places like The New York Times, Aperture, Harper’s Magazine, TIME, Oxford American, and the Walker Arts Center. He has been awarded an Aaron Siskind Foundation Individual Photographer’s Fellowship and a Rhode Island Foundation MacColl Johnson artist fellowship. He recently had a solo exhibition at Aperture Gallery in New York. His feature documentary and first film “Hale County This Morning, This Evening” won a Special Jury Award for Creative Vision at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival, was nominated for an Oscar at the 91st Academy Awards, and has screened at the Museum of Modern Art, National Gallery of Art, Hammer Museum, Institute of Contemporary Art - London, Museum of Moving Image, and Lincoln Center. RaMell double majored in English and Sociology at Georgetown University and teaches in Brown University’s Visual Art Department. “Images from South County, AL (a Hale County)” and new work was displayed in a solo exhibition at the Ogden Museum in late 2020.

“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. In his directorial debut, award-winning photographer and director RaMell Ross offers a refreshingly direct approach to documentary that fills in the gaps between individual black male icons. “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 offering a testament to dreaming despite the odds.

Visiting Filmmakers Series Online is sponsored by: Film and Video Studies, CHSS, CVPA, the English Department, School of Art, Global Affairs and Global Programs, CVPA's Kritikos Series: Arts in Context, University Libraries, Film and Media Studies, the Interdisciplinary Curriculum Committee, History and Art History, University Life, and Women and Gender Studies.

Learn more about the Visiting Filmmakers Series on the website: https://vfs.gmu.edu.