Raven Jackson’s All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt is a small miracle. A feature debut from the Tennessee-born writer and director, the A24-backed film acts as a meditation on life, a poetic retelling of moments that wash and wade, tug and pull, and shape and break one’s heart. Jackson composes her drama as a collection of experiences for Mack, played by Kaylee Nicole Johnson in childhood and Charleen McClure in adulthood, snapshots of a Black woman’s life in Mississippi. Both actors imbue reality into this character, a sense that Mack is so much more than just a character in a movie. Jackson tells Mack’s story without a need for linear consistency, instead deciding to focus on the people, places, sounds, and feelings that molded her.
Never hurried, the 92-minute film takes its time in sadness and sweetness in equal measure, balancing between 10-minute hugs and...
Never hurried, the 92-minute film takes its time in sadness and sweetness in equal measure, balancing between 10-minute hugs and...
- 11/3/2023
- by Michael Frank
- The Film Stage
The sound of chirping cicadas, calling to their mates. The feel of the scales on a freshly caught fish. The way the late afternoon light reflects off a backwoods creek, as a fishing bobber floats idly on the surface. You hear thunder crack in the distance; you can practically smell the ozone in the air that lingers before a lightning strike. A hand dips into the brackish water near the shore, the dark silt run between fingers causing it to muddy and cloud before slowly ebbing away …
It is admittedly...
It is admittedly...
- 11/3/2023
- by David Fear
- Rollingstone.com
There’s no shortage of new shows and films to watch and enjoy this November, from Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla and a new Meg Ryan-directed romcom, to the long-anticipated A Murder at the End of the World.
This month’s TV slate also sees familiar favorites making their return, including For All Mankind, The Crown (beginning its final season), and even Fargo (whose cast this season includes Juno Temple and Jon Hamm).
Similarly, you could have a pretty good November at the movies simply by catching up with some...
This month’s TV slate also sees familiar favorites making their return, including For All Mankind, The Crown (beginning its final season), and even Fargo (whose cast this season includes Juno Temple and Jon Hamm).
Similarly, you could have a pretty good November at the movies simply by catching up with some...
- 11/1/2023
- by Keith Phipps
- Rollingstone.com
The first image in writer-director Raven Jackson’s All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt—a close-up of a hand squeezing a freshly caught fish, its reflective scales mirrored by the twinkling, gauzy light captured on 35mm by cinematographer Jomo Fray—quickly immerses us in the film’s world. The relationship between bodies and the natural world that surrounds them, mediated by the physical properties of film, is central to Jackson’s work. As the scene progresses, the camera’s focus remains resolutely on what may seem like its incidental textures, tracking the interplay of skin, earth, and water as if they were brushstrokes on a canvas.
The elemental poeticism of these images is clear evidence of Jackson’s promise as a filmmaker, and yet this opening sequence also points to why All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt amounts to a limited showcase for her talents. Essentially all of the film’s aesthetic,...
The elemental poeticism of these images is clear evidence of Jackson’s promise as a filmmaker, and yet this opening sequence also points to why All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt amounts to a limited showcase for her talents. Essentially all of the film’s aesthetic,...
- 10/6/2023
- by Brad Hanford
- Slant Magazine
“All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt” director Raven Jackson is taking her time.
“I’m interested in patience,” she says ahead of her feature debut’s San Sebastian screening, following the Sundance premiere earlier this year.
“I am interested in slow cinema, even though in the U.S. it’s not as prominent. When I was in the edit [with Lee Chatametikool], I knew that many audience members are not used to such a pace. But that challenge excited me.”
“My short ‘Nettles’ took its time too, but I wonder to what degree it will continue with my next feature. There’s no world where it makes sense for a hug to last 15 seconds [like in ‘All Dirt Roads’] and I’m not sure if every one of my films will ask for such patience. If they do, I’m going to give it to them.”
In the A24 release “All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt” – produced by Maria Altamirano,...
“I’m interested in patience,” she says ahead of her feature debut’s San Sebastian screening, following the Sundance premiere earlier this year.
“I am interested in slow cinema, even though in the U.S. it’s not as prominent. When I was in the edit [with Lee Chatametikool], I knew that many audience members are not used to such a pace. But that challenge excited me.”
“My short ‘Nettles’ took its time too, but I wonder to what degree it will continue with my next feature. There’s no world where it makes sense for a hug to last 15 seconds [like in ‘All Dirt Roads’] and I’m not sure if every one of my films will ask for such patience. If they do, I’m going to give it to them.”
In the A24 release “All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt” – produced by Maria Altamirano,...
- 9/23/2023
- by Marta Balaga
- Variety Film + TV
As the wait continues for those dagnabbit major Hollywood studios (AMPTP) to stop dragging their feet and hash out a fair deal with the striking actors' guild (SAG-AFTRA) and writers' guild (WGA), indie wunderkind entertainment company A24 just keeps on trucking along. Although the studio recently elected to delay "Problemista," the feature directorial debut from "Saturday Night Live" alum and "Los Espookys" co-creator/star Julio Torres that picked up lots of critical acclaim from its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival (read /Film's review), A24's Australian horror flick "Talk to Me" continues to do boffo business at the box office and even has a sequel in the works.
Meanwhile, the studio has yet to slow down its marketing for its upcoming slate of films, including "Dicks: The Musical" and the decidedly different sounding "All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt," another film from a first-time feature director that garnered raves at Sundance earlier this year.
Meanwhile, the studio has yet to slow down its marketing for its upcoming slate of films, including "Dicks: The Musical" and the decidedly different sounding "All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt," another film from a first-time feature director that garnered raves at Sundance earlier this year.
- 8/9/2023
- by Sandy Schaefer
- Slash Film
Raven Jackson’s directorial debut All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt is a distillation of cinema to its purest form, a stunning patchwork of experience and memory. Daring in its formal gambits but universal for how it explores humanity’s connection with nature, loss, and love, it’s among few films in the history of Sundance that genuinely seems to advance the language and possibilities of cinema. With adoring notes of Terrence Malick, Andrei Tarkovsky, Carlos Reygadas, and Julie Dash, Jackson isn’t wholly reinventing what has come before, but rather pushing this poetic-based variety into thrilling new territories.
Freed from the shackles of linear storytelling, Jackson jumps around the life of Mack, a Black woman from Mississippi, as we witness glimpses of her childhood, teenage years, and beyond. We begin with her as a child (Kaylee Nicole Johnson) fishing with her father (Chris Chalk), though it’s many minutes...
Freed from the shackles of linear storytelling, Jackson jumps around the life of Mack, a Black woman from Mississippi, as we witness glimpses of her childhood, teenage years, and beyond. We begin with her as a child (Kaylee Nicole Johnson) fishing with her father (Chris Chalk), though it’s many minutes...
- 1/26/2023
- by Jordan Raup
- The Film Stage
Raven Jackson started out as a poet, a background that is at the heart of her eloquent, imagistic first feature. All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt presents the life of a Black woman in the rural South through elegantly composed vignettes. On paper, that approach sounds too precious to live. As the story follows Mack from her girlhood in the 1970s across several decades, the film has minimal dialogue and a narrative that offers fragments of her life in time-shifting episodes. But miraculously, all its elements come together. Jackson’s risky, beautifully realized film puts a pure artistic vision on screen.
Jackson has cited Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust as an influence, and, as in that groundbreaking 1991 film, each scene is so deliberately composed that it conveys a wealth of information and emotion. Jomo Fray’s lush cinematography, shot on 35 mm, grounds the story in the landscape of woods,...
Jackson has cited Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust as an influence, and, as in that groundbreaking 1991 film, each scene is so deliberately composed that it conveys a wealth of information and emotion. Jomo Fray’s lush cinematography, shot on 35 mm, grounds the story in the landscape of woods,...
- 1/24/2023
- by Caryn James
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
Nestled deep in the first half of “All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt,” once we have acclimated to its sensuous audiovisual idioms, is an encounter between former lovers Mack (Charleen McClure) and Wood (Reginald Helms Jr.), no longer sharing a mutual path. Few words escape their lips, but their hands hold onto one another with loving desperation, as if hoping that through a long embrace, everything unsaid could, by osmosis, seep into their bodies. Their kinetic exchange — with fingers clasped tightly that communicate their unwillingness to let go — sits in nearly silent contemplation.
Elsewhere in writer-director Raven Jackson’s debut feature, however, the perpetual cacophony of nature in the rural South scores the rich imagery like a tireless orchestra that ties everything we witness back to the land. The sounds of torrential rain drenching everything in its way, of crickets and frogs serenading the moon, all intermingle in communion with...
Elsewhere in writer-director Raven Jackson’s debut feature, however, the perpetual cacophony of nature in the rural South scores the rich imagery like a tireless orchestra that ties everything we witness back to the land. The sounds of torrential rain drenching everything in its way, of crickets and frogs serenading the moon, all intermingle in communion with...
- 1/22/2023
- by Carlos Aguilar
- The Wrap
In the American South, they’ve been known to say, “A child’s gotta eat their share of dirt.” And Raven Jackson’s thoughtful, fragmentary portrait of a Black woman over four decades of rural Mississippian life certainly encompasses the kind of hard life lessons that could be thus summed up. But the strange poetry of the film’s title also gently turns that harsh homily on its head, instead relating it to the tradition, inherited from African ancestors and still relatively common in parts of the country, for Black women to gather across generations and harvest little scoops of pale dirt from the roadside — actually the chalky mineral kaolinite which is plentiful across the southeastern U.S. — to eat, as a kind of communal ritual.
“All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt” is deeply invested in the investigation of tradition, family and memory, and the sensory, evocative language of the...
“All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt” is deeply invested in the investigation of tradition, family and memory, and the sensory, evocative language of the...
- 1/22/2023
- by Jessica Kiang
- Variety Film + TV
A memory, tinged with aching rawness, emerges in “All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt,” the feature debut by writer/director Raven Jackson. This memory briefly foretells the knotting stream of remembrances that roots our protagonist, Mack (played in these early childhood scenes by a sage Kaylee Nicole Johnson). It begins in 1970, with young Mack’s hands caressing a fish’s scales before throwing the suffocated creature back into the glinting water.
Continue reading ‘All Dirt Roads Taste Of Salt’ Review: Raven Jackson Delivers A Potent Tribute To Black Life [Sundance] at The Playlist.
Continue reading ‘All Dirt Roads Taste Of Salt’ Review: Raven Jackson Delivers A Potent Tribute To Black Life [Sundance] at The Playlist.
- 1/22/2023
- by Robert Daniels
- The Playlist
The Sundance Institute has released its lineup for the 2023 Sundance Film Festival. The annual festival will take place January 19-29 in Park City, Utah and will feature the “upcoming year’s most impactful independent stories.”
To kick off the event, IMDb will present “Opening Night: A Taste of Sundance” to raise funds for the organization, in addition to “Day One Features” which will show 11 features and a short film program. Over the course of the festival, the Institute will show 101 feature films which were selected from over 15,000 submissions, both from the U.S. and internationally. The films fall into a number of categories.
Tickets for the festival can be purchased here.
Here is the lineup for the 2023 Sundance Film Festival, as announced by The Sundance Institute:
U.S. Dramatic Competition
Presenting 12 world premieres of fiction feature films, the Dramatic Competition offers audiences a first look at groundbreaking new voices in American independent film.
To kick off the event, IMDb will present “Opening Night: A Taste of Sundance” to raise funds for the organization, in addition to “Day One Features” which will show 11 features and a short film program. Over the course of the festival, the Institute will show 101 feature films which were selected from over 15,000 submissions, both from the U.S. and internationally. The films fall into a number of categories.
Tickets for the festival can be purchased here.
Here is the lineup for the 2023 Sundance Film Festival, as announced by The Sundance Institute:
U.S. Dramatic Competition
Presenting 12 world premieres of fiction feature films, the Dramatic Competition offers audiences a first look at groundbreaking new voices in American independent film.
- 12/8/2022
- by Miranda Dipaolo
- Uinterview
The 2023 Sundance Film Festival’s lineup of 101 feature films includes contributions from 23 countries. The Sundance Institute notes 28 of the festival’s slate comes from first-time feature filmmakers, and 94 of the films will be making their world premieres at the 2023 festival.
More than 4,0000 feature films were submitted for consideration.
“Maintaining an essential place for artists to express themselves, take risks, and for visionary stories to endure and entertain is distinctly Sundance,” said Robert Redford, Sundance Institute Founder and President. “The Festival continues to foster these values and connections through independent storytelling. We are honored to share the compelling selection of work at this year’s Festival from distinct perspectives and unique voices.”
The 2023 Sundance Film Festival runs from January 19-29th. 2022’s festival was canceled due to a surge in Covid-19, but barring any setbacks, the 2023 event will once again return to in-person screenings. Some films will also be available online...
More than 4,0000 feature films were submitted for consideration.
“Maintaining an essential place for artists to express themselves, take risks, and for visionary stories to endure and entertain is distinctly Sundance,” said Robert Redford, Sundance Institute Founder and President. “The Festival continues to foster these values and connections through independent storytelling. We are honored to share the compelling selection of work at this year’s Festival from distinct perspectives and unique voices.”
The 2023 Sundance Film Festival runs from January 19-29th. 2022’s festival was canceled due to a surge in Covid-19, but barring any setbacks, the 2023 event will once again return to in-person screenings. Some films will also be available online...
- 12/7/2022
- by Rebecca Murray
- Showbiz Junkies
Setting the stage for the year in cinema, the 2023 Sundance Film Festival will take place January 19-29, both in person in Utah as well as virtual viewings kicking off five days into the festival. Ahead of next month’s festivities, the festival has now unveiled its features lineup, which features 99 films.
Initial highlights of the lineup include Ira Sachs’ Passages, starring Franz Rogowski, Adèle Exarchopoulos, and Ben Whishaw, William Oldroyd’s Lady Macbeth follow-up Eileen, Raven Jackson’s All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt, produced by Barry Jenkins, Bad Behaviour, the directorial debut of Jane Campion’s daughter Alice Englert, Brandon Cronenberg’s Infinity Pool, starring Alexander Skarsgård and Mia Goth, Nicole Holofcener’s’ You Hurt My Feelings starring Julia Louis-Dreyfus, and more.
U.S. Dramatic Competition
The 12 films in this section are all world premieres. All 12 will be available to stream online.
The Accidental Getaway Driver (Director and Screenwriter: Sing J. Lee,...
Initial highlights of the lineup include Ira Sachs’ Passages, starring Franz Rogowski, Adèle Exarchopoulos, and Ben Whishaw, William Oldroyd’s Lady Macbeth follow-up Eileen, Raven Jackson’s All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt, produced by Barry Jenkins, Bad Behaviour, the directorial debut of Jane Campion’s daughter Alice Englert, Brandon Cronenberg’s Infinity Pool, starring Alexander Skarsgård and Mia Goth, Nicole Holofcener’s’ You Hurt My Feelings starring Julia Louis-Dreyfus, and more.
U.S. Dramatic Competition
The 12 films in this section are all world premieres. All 12 will be available to stream online.
The Accidental Getaway Driver (Director and Screenwriter: Sing J. Lee,...
- 12/7/2022
- by Jordan Raup
- The Film Stage
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