Oscar nominee RaMell Ross to curate Full Frame doc festival's 2019 Thematic Program

Director of Hale County This Morning, This Evening to explore "poetic modes of storytelling" through slate of films

Director RaMell Ross at the Sundance Film Festival, where he premiered his short documentary "Easter Snap." Park City, Utah, January 27, 2019. Photo by Matt Carey

Filmmaker RaMell Ross' calendar is filling up post Oscars.

The director of Hale County This Morning, This Evening, whose film competes for an Academy Award this weekend, has been named curator of the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival's 2019 Thematic Program.

The program Ross will lead, dubbed New Lives of Time, aims to explore "poetic modes of storytelling by highlighting documentary films that offer idiosyncratic experiences—films that create space for viewers to wander their own imaginations to make connections and meaning," Full Frame said in a statement. "The series also examines how time works on screen by revealing, through a range of filmic forms, the way that passing minutes, hours, and days provide a cinematic structure and underscore deeper significance within the work."
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This year’s program allows us to reflect on the documentary form, and even the very experience of watching, through the lens of a visionary filmmaker.

--Sadie Tillery, Full Frame artistic director

"In imagining this year’s series, I wanted to explore films that invite us on distinctive journeys and submerge us in the tides of time and place. It is immensely exciting to collaborate with RaMell on this idea," Full Frame artistic director Sadie Tillery said. "This year’s program allows us to reflect on the documentary form, and even the very experience of watching, through the lens of a visionary filmmaker.”

Hale County has won acclaim for its poetic depiction of African-American life in the rural South, eschewing traditional narrative tropes in documentary film. Bilge Ebiri, writing in Village Voice, praised the documentary for inaugurating "a new cinematic language." 

“I’m interested in the type of filmmaking where the film’s form is a unique body for the content’s life, where the work is of the filmmaker’s encrypted, personal language, where the poetic is inextricable from truth,” Ross said in a statement. “The opportunity to collaborate with Sadie to explore the contours of these ideas is a joy in itself and is no surprise coming from the Full Frame team, who have continually produced a festival that exemplifies the integrity and values of the documentary film community. They have great standards for us to try to live up to.”

​Full Frame runs April 4-7 in Durham, North Carolina.