All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt. 2023. USA. Written and directed by Raven Jackson. With Charleen McClure, Moses Ingram, Reginald Helms Jr., Zainab Jah, Sheila Atim, Chris Chalk. DCP. 92 min.
In line with a long tradition of Black feminist films in which Black girlhood is rooted in a deep sense of place (Gullah in Daughters of the Dust, Eve’s Bayou’s Creole Louisiana, urban New York in Just Another Girl on the I.R.T.), Raven Jackson’s All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt makes the lives of the women at its center and their Mississippi Gulf surroundings near-mythic. Skirting the usual trappings of coming-of-age narratives, Jackson’s debut feature eschews dialogue and linear storytelling in favor of poetic impressionism.
A straightforward story of daughterhood, sisterhood, and motherhood for Black women is rendered sensuous and atypically experimental—not least because of Jackson’s insistence that we experience Black Mississippi by way of sense-memory, the texture of time, and even the attitudes of the weather. Her Mississippi, dwelling among the underprivileged, is nevertheless abundant and all-encompassing.