Making Cinema Matter in Baltimore is a FREE artist-led workshop and screening series featuring five nationally recognized visiting filmmakers. Distinguished filmmakers will lead workshops and community seminars that connect their films and filmmaking to social, creative, or cultural issues in Baltimore. Participants will explore impacts of film and media; to learn emerging practices in filmmaking; and to build local and national professional networks.  This project is presented in partnership with Johns Hopkins University, Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), Maryland Film Festival/Stavros Niarchos Foundation Parkway Theatre, Baltimore Office of Promotion & The Arts, and the Saul Zaentz Innovation Fund.

This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

FILM | Hale County This Morning, This Evening

Fri Oct 5, 7pm | Screening at the Parkway Theatre

How does one express the reality of individuals whose public image, lives, and humanity originate in exploitation? 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. Hale County This Morning, This Evening 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.

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.