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A series of screenings presented in collaboration with Louverture Films that seeks to generate discussions about cinema as a strategy of complexity and plurality and as a resistance to constructed realities
A film by RaMell Ross that documents the intimate and unencumbered moments of people in a community in Alabama's Black Belt
Slought and the SP2 Social Justice and Arts Integration Initiative at the University of Pennsylvania are pleased to announce a special screening of Hale County This Morning, This Evening (2018) on Monday, November 12, 2018 from 6:30-9:30pm at Zellerbach Theatre at the Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts. 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. This event is free and open to the public, however registration is requested. Please plan to arrive early as registering does not guarantee you a seat. Seating is first come, first served.
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.
In addition to being one of the most acclaimed actors of our time with a career spanning 30 years, Danny Glover has also produced, executive produced and financed numerous projects for film, television and theatre and is the co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Louverture Films. He is the recipient of countless awards for his humanitarian and advocacy efforts on behalf of economic and social justice causes, Glover is a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador and a recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award from Amnesty International.
Joslyn Barnes is a writer and producer and co-founder and Chief Operating Officer of Louverture Films. In 2017, Barnes was the recipient of both the Cinereach Producer Award and the Sundance Institute | Amazon Studios Producer Award. In 2018, she was nominated for an Academy Award for Documentary Feature and won the Emmy Award for Exceptional Merit in Documentary Filmmaking.
Robb Moss is a documentary filmmaker whose work has screened at Sundance, MOMA, on theatrical screens around America and at festivals around the world. He is a creative advisor at the Sundance Institute's Doc Edit Lab, served eight years as a Board Director for ITVS, and has taught filmmaking at Harvard University for the past thirty years where he is currently a Harvard College Professor and Chair of the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies.
Patricia J. Williams is the James L. Dohr Professor of Law at Columbia Law School. She has published widely in the areas of race, gender, and law, and on other issues of legal theory and legal writing. Her books include The Alchemy of Race and Rights; The Rooster's Egg; and Seeing a Color Blind Future: The Paradox of Race. Williams is also a columnist for The Nation. Williams has been a MacArthur fellow, and serves on the board of trustees at Wellesley College.