Ramell Ross Biography
RaMell Ross is a cinematographer, photographer, writer, and director, known for Hale County This Morning, This Evening of 2018, Easter Snap of 2019 and Storyville of 1997. He was born in Fairfax, Virginia, United States
Ross received a BA in English and Sociology from Georgetown University and an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design.
Ramell Ross Age|Born
Born on May 15, 1982, Ross is 37 years years of age as of 2019 and is of American nationality.
Ramell Ross Hale County
It is directed by RaMell Ross and produced by Joslyn Barnes, it was Ross’s first nonfiction feature.
Hale County This Morning, This Evening is an English-language documentary film about the lives of black people in Hale County, Alabama. The documentary is the winner of the 2018 Sundance Film Festival award for the U.S. Documentary Special Jury Award for Creative Vision. It is currently nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.
Ramell Ross Brown
He is an assistant professor in Brown’s Visual Art Department.
Ramell Ross Basketball
When in Lake Braddock Secondary School, Burke, Virginia, he played for Georgetown (Sr).
Ramell Ross Oscar
He has been nominated for the 91st Academy Awards for Best Documentary Feature 2019 · Hale County This Morning, This Evening.
Ramell Ross Nominations And Awards
Nominations
- 2019 · Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature for Hale County This Morning, This Evening
- 2019 · Primetime Emmy Award for Exceptional Merit in Documentary Filmmaking for Hale County This Morning, This Evening
- 2019 · Directors Guild of America Award for Outstanding Directing – Documentaries for Hale County This Morning, This Evening
- 2019 · Independent Spirit Award for Best Documentary Feature for Hale County This Morning, This Evening
- 2019 · Independent Spirit Truer Than Fiction Award for Hale County This Morning, This Evening
Awards
Gotham Independent Film Award for Best Documentary
Ramell Ross Ogden
He has exhibited photographs in the U.S. and internationally, and appeared in outlets such as the New York Times, the Washington Post and Oxford American.
In 2015, he was part of Filmmaker Magazine’s “25 New Faces of Independent Film” and was a Sundance Institute New Frontier Artist in Residence in the MIT Media Lab. In 2016 he was a finalist for the Aperture Portfolio Prize, winner of an Arron Siskind Individual Photographer’s Fellowship Grant and Sundance Art of Nonfiction Fellowship. He was recently awarded a Rhode Island Foundation Robert MacColl Johnson, Artist Grant.
Ramell Ross Instagram
Ramell Ross Interview
The God of the Camera is a Coloniser
Sitting in the dim-lit bar of Berlin’s most iconic theatre, the Volksbühne (a slab of concrete of modernist grandeur located in the heart of the former East Berlin, the Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz), RaMell Ross is waiting to introduce a screening of his Hale County This Morning, This Evening. It’s the end of the tour.
As I take a seat next to him, his engrossing ethnography of an African-American community in central Alabama has spent the past year and a half touring the festival circuit, including bows at Sundance (where it nabbed the 2018 Special Jury Prize), True/False, CPH:DOX and New York’s New Directors/New Films, before skyrocketing the 37 year-old into planetary fame with an Academy Award nomination for Best Documentary Feature.
Ross, as title cards have it, moved to Hale County in 2009 to coach basketball and teach photography. Hale County marks his directing debut. Shot over a period of five years, the documentary homes in on two young African-American Hale County denizens – budding father and local catfish plant worker Quincy Bryant, and Selma University student and NBA player hopeful Daniel Collins. They serve as the entry-points into a community framed through a mosaic of everyday rituals, gestures, choreographies – locker room banter, a baptism, a baby scurrying back and forth across a living room, guitar and basketball practice.
It’s large canvass whose beguilingly ordinary moments gradually sublimate into an otherworldly milieu, conjuring up an elegy of the epic-banal, as Ross would call it, a celebration of life inside a community that never once sensationalizes its suffering or overtly gives in to nostalgia. Hale County was born out of Ross’ interrogations, as an African-American, into the ways “we’ve come to be seen” – and in the process, it offers a whimsical alternative, one that posits blackness as default and doesn’t shoot at its subjects, but with them.
Invited to the Volksbühne as part of the VariaVision program, a collaborative curatorial platform founded by Giulio Bursi and designed to showcase works moving beyond traditional filmmaking formats, Ross sat with me for a good hour to talk about his Hale County and expand on a few points he’s touched in an ever-growing body of articles, reflections, notes.
A prolific writer and now a professor at Brown, two of the articles Ross recently penned served as backbones for the following conversation, edited and condensed for clarity. For Walker Art, an elegy on loss, memory, and photography; for Film Quarterly, as part of an issue devoted to reclaiming black film and media studies, a manifesto on the ways to renew our encounter with both fields.
Early into your piece in Walker Art, you imagine what it’d be like if a stranger picked up an old photograph of your mum. You say the encounter terrifies you, because “the American stranger knows blackness as a fact,” and that “to the American stranger, she is the synthesis of every encounter and thought associated with Blackness.” I really liked the idea, particularly because it reminded me of your preoccupations about truth, and your claims that documentary has people somehow predisposed to it. Did you ever envisage Hale County as fiction, or did you always think of it as a documentary?
I could imagine it being considered fiction, or being attractive to people interested in the aesthetics or organization of fiction. I think the only reason why Hale County is a documentary is that we always wanted it to be that way. Obviously that’s because of that certain predisposition to truth you have with documentaries, but also because of a certain way of looking that’s specific to them, a truthful way of looking: a belief that what you see exists out there in the world, and that you can encounter it, and that you possibly do encounter every day. But I’m happy Hale County is being programmed as a fiction film because [documentary and fiction] speak to each other in fascinating ways.
Would you ever see yourself working on fiction?
Yeah definitely. I’m working on a project right now with the same company I worked with for Hale County. And I think there’s just as many structural and formal things that can happen within fiction to reflect back the subtle and tacit indoctrination that goes along with watching anything that’s media-oriented. It just takes the right narrative and characters to work.
Source: http://sensesofcinema.com