Raven Jackson’s debut narrative feature film All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt is a beautifully photographed poetic journey into a young girl’s inner and outer growth, set in picturesque rural Mississippi.
Written and directed by Raven Jackson with stunning cinematography by Jomo Fray and a haunting music score by Sasha Gordon and Victor Magro, All Dirt Roads defies the basic rules of linear story telling, taking the viewer deep inside the innermost thoughts and impressions of a young woman’s emotional and spiritual journey of self-discovery.
Jackson is a poet first, and her new film reflects it.
Celebrated for her previous short films Nettles and A Guide to Breathing Underwater, she created a lyrical portrait that explores the life of Mack, a young Black woman, on her way to womanhood.
“Even though the film doesn’t have a traditional plot point “A”, plot point “B” structure, it still is going on an emotional journey,” Jackson told a post screening audience.
“It speaks to my background in poetry and how I would order the portraits, which is what I call the scenes, as to how I would order them in a poetry book. Being able to speak to that and the kind of feeling I was trying to evoke was very important to me.”
One of the ways in which Jackson and her crew reached her goal was to read through and discuss a “cinematic manifesto” each day of the shoot.
“One of the things we decided was that this would be a very tactile film, which was key. Another was to maintain the constant movement of time. We were very clear that we weren’t trying to make Mack look different at age 7 and again at age 30. We were clear that it was all happening ‘now.’ That idea really spoke to the kind of feeling we were trying to evoke.
“Another was ‘stay close-stay wide,’ which means ‘are you seeing it all in the moment?’ We shot several tableaus in which we were always pushing ourselves to look at scenes from different angles. I think that’s what added to the fluidness of the film. Also the nature of it. The cycles. The movement.
“We really tried to reflect how life is actually lived. How it feels in the moment. How beauty and grief, joy and tragedy usually coexist in how we experience life. It all exists together all the time. Life is not lived out in separate acts like a movie or a play. This movie has a non-linear structure that allows the characters to live out all of these emotions at the same time.”
The title to All Roads comes from something her grandmother told Jackson as a child.
“My vision for the film was as a visual collage that featured Mack surrounded by her family and the community she is growing up in.
“The coexisting of emotions is something that was important for me. There’s one scene where Mack is watching her parents dance, and there’s so much joy. Then she’s told that children shouldn’t speak until they’re spoken to. I wanted different colors of emotion to live together in that way.
“Ultimately, this is a film about life, from the most profound moments to the totally mundane. Its not just about reaching from sadness to joy, it’s about all of the shades in between. I wanted the film to show all of those different shades.
Another key element for Jackson was creating a sense of the community that surrounded her central character.
“My vision for the film was as a visual collage that featured Mack surrounded by her family and the community she is growing up in.
The title to All Roads comes from something her grandmother told Jackson as a child.
“A lot of what inspired the film came from looking at my grandmother’s photo albums. What I saw there were generations. I thought about my relationship to them and their history.”
“The film starts with Mack fishing with her father in the local river. “I grew up fishing. As a child, it was central to me.
“Also, although I grew up in Tennessee, I wound up shooting the film in Mississippi. My mother is from there. I also saw some old photographs of Roseville church in Mississippi and I wanted that to be a central location. So it all evolved from there.
“In many ways, it all seemed like a conversation across generations. In the process, I really became connected to the area and the people who lived there. Many of them became involved in the film as background actors and in other ways. The animal wrangler, for example, was someone who knew my mother as a little girl. It really became a lovely conversation through which I became connected to them and to my own family in a way.”
All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt is currently headed to the Montclair Film Festival and the Indie Memphis Film Festival where Jackson was handpicked by Oscar-winning and Emmy nominated director Barry Jenkins (Moonlight 2016, Academy Award for Best Picture, If Beale Street Could Talk 2018, Academy Award and Golden Globe nominations for Best Screenplay) for its Black Filmmaker Residency in Screenwriting in 2019.
For more, visit chicagofilmfestival.com.