Film Journal 2024: All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt

Film Journal 2024: All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt
Directed by Raven Jackson
Where to watch: available on VOD

“An ode to connection — with loved ones and with place.”

This descriptive from the official synopsis perfectly captures the spirit of this film. It’s a series of moments, captured as memories, strung together in the way we often try to make sense of our lives, our stories- non linear, with the sort of illusionary appeal to randomness that betrays the inspirations and triggers behind our recollections. The vantage point we are given here is that of a young black girl come of age in Mississippi, a viewpoint that traverses the symbolic nature of the young eventual mother seeking meaning from her own perspective childhood. Thus we move between observations from the smallness of the child’s sought after imagination, to the maturing sightlines of one who knows a more comprehensive reality filled with both wonder and loss. It’s a stark and beautiful contrast of images that locate the films larger thematic interests and narrative cohesion in the act of growing up into the world.

And not just the world, but a particular time and place, one captured in the power of the senses. What one sees in the blades of the grass. What one feels in an embrace or a breeze. The smells that both create and evoke memory. What one hears in the silence, in the rush of water, in gentle chorus of crickets.

The films opening sequence, which focuses on a series of images involving the young girl and a fish, becomes a lasting symbol for how this young girl experiences the world. We see in these moments a gentle mix of beauty and horror, life and death. Things that coexist not in balance, but in tension. Anytime we confront moments of tragedy or sorrow in the experiences of our main protagonist, we are called to seek and to hold the quiet moments of contrast. Two kinds of soil, one promising hope, the other seeded with the stuff of sorrow and struggle. “You gotta find the right bank and dig for it. It’s not just any dirt.” A truth that finds its meaning in the water that frames the films reigning imagery of life’s ebb and flow… “it doesn’t end or begin, it just changes form.”