Directed by: Raven Jackson
Distributed by: A24
Written by Michael Clawson
80/100
The 2024 edition of the Sundance Film Festival just finished, which means that only now are some films from the previous year’s festival finally making their way into theaters and digital venues. One such film is the lyrical and impressionistic debut from director Raven Jackson, “All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt.” A freeform meditation on rural Southern womanhood, the film’s shape is that of a mosaic of moments from a Mississippian woman’s life. The woman is Mack, variously played by Kaylee Nicole Johnson, Charleen McClure, and Zainab Jah, who we meet as a young girl in the ‘60s, but observe at different ages as the film’s editing skips us forward and backward in time. Strikingly, “All Dirt Roads” doesn’t privilege or anchor itself to any one of its character’s phases or ages. The film’s conception of time is more spherical than linear, such that a cut from one year to another registers not as a “flashback” or “flash-forward,” but as a turning of a life’s whole to see one of its innumerable other sides.
Mack’s existence is one of joy, pain, and everything in between. In a glistening opening sequence, Mack’s father teaches her how to fish, and Jackson teaches us how to watch her film. Rather than their faces, the camera is drawn to Mack’s hands as she manages the reel on her fishing rod, carefully following her dad’s instructions. Dirt swirls in the water, thunder rumbles overhead. Throughout “All Dirt Roads,” Jackson remains attuned to the textures of skin and the natural world. Whether Mack is fileting a catfish for the first time as a kid, caressing her pregnant belly in early adulthood as rain beats down on her roof, or dipping her fingers into the water where her mother passed away, the camera is routinely, instinctively turned towards Mack’s hands, which register as the link between her rich emotional being and her vivid physical experience of the world. While the movie is, on one hand, beautifully specific to the qualities of life in the American South, it is, on the other hand, universal in its rumination on the relationship between body and soul.
With storytelling that’s achieved almost entirely through visual and sonic means, “All Dirt Roads” represents a poetic harmonization of film direction, sound, editing, and cinematography. It isn’t without flaws: there are passages that last for too long, leading to a feeling of narrative rudderlessness. For some, I’m sure its visual themes will grow tiresome. But in my eyes, Jackson’s formal ingenuity is remarkable, her sensuous artistry often ravishing. I think of scenes like Mack, as a girl, watching her parents dance together in a living room, or Mack, as an adult, attending her sister’s wedding, where the camera roams through a chapel as a group of people sing. Free of expository dialogue, such moments seem to dial directly into the essence of Mack’s sensory and spiritual experience. They represent the exquisite heights this film can reach in terms of emotional delicacy.
“All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt” Trailer
Michael Clawson is a member of the Seattle Film Critic Society you can follow his passion for film on Letterboxd.