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
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