All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt
Raven Jackson's feature debut captures the poetry of memory and generational ties.
Andrei Tarkovsky referred to moviemaking as “sculpting in time,” an appropriately poetic way to describe the art form, especially for a director who was fixated on images and textures that conjure memory. The “time sculpture” description can’t be reasonably applied to every movie—there’s a difference between art and entertainment—but the movies that do earn such a title should be treasured. Raven Jackson’s debut feature All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt is one such film. It marries Jackson’s sense for image-making as a photographer to her expressive instincts as a poet: richly economical in form, dripping in beauty.
All Dirt Roads… shares the same elliptical time-jumping sensibility as Tarkovsky’s own Mirror. But where Mirror reflects outward, questioning the very nature of history and Russian national identity, All Dirt Roads… turns itself upward and inward, tracing the life of a single person via her relationship to the land. Mack (played at various stages of her life by Kaylee Nicole Johnson, Charleen McClure, Mylee Shannon, and Zainab Jah) lives in rural Mississippi. We see very little of her everyday life, but we don’t need to. Jackson’s tight focus on the ordinary poetry of water, dirt, and the hands of her characters tells us more than enough to understand Mack’s point of view.
The film ruminates on textures—fish scales, silt in the river, rain on clay—returning again and again to the same imagery in different situations, emphasizing the interconnectedness of things. In an early sequence, Mack watches adults with buckets trying to put out a house fire. Later on, two adults bathe a baby in the kitchen sink, their hands scooping the water over the child with a tenderness that nevertheless matches the urgency of the other adults scooping water in buckets to fight fire. We are what we do, especially in communities that rely on interconnected networks of care. When something happens isn’t all that important, only that it did happen to this specific person. And because she is so tightly tied to the land, to her family, and to her community, what matters to her matters to the rest of the people in her sphere. Jackson gives us everything without ever needing to explicitly tell us what or why. Her film is poetry in motion. —Sarah Welch-Larson
★★★★
All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt is in limited release now.