During my final semester at Brown University in Spring 2024, I needed one more film class to fulfill the requirements for my degree in Modern Culture and Media. I’d spent one entire semester watching movies from the French New Wave, analyzed every Hitchcock film, and read Laura Mulvey’s seminal essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” more times than I could count. I was craving something different—a departure from the clichéd “film major” canon.
Stepping into RaMell Ross’s senior seminar, “Other Lives of Time,” I knew I was in the perfect space to grow as a filmmaker and a thinker. Publicized only via word of mouth, the class was inherently self-selecting. There was no formal syllabus, and it met twice a week in five-hour chunks.
Interestingly, the course was listed in the Visual Arts department, not in Modern Culture and Media, where most film classes were found. I had to dig to find it in the course catalogue, which was intentional on Ross’s part. Teaching in Visual Arts allowed Ross to rent each student in the class a DSLR camera for the entire semester; in the film department, we’d only have been able to check them out for a few days at a time. It was also philosophically fitting that the course was listed in Visual Arts, given Ross’s extensive background in still photography and archival projects. His forte lies in exploring the power of film as a medium and an art, as opposed to its theory or mechanics.
I was sold after the first class I attended, during which we watched T (2019) by Keisha Rae Witherspoon. The film itself is only 14 minutes long, but the ten of us spent hours decoding what we’d seen. Was it unscripted, or were these actors? What makes a film a documentary? Does it ultimately matter to the meaning of the project if the people telling the story onscreen are real or acting?
Each class spawned abstract conversations like this one, as we interacted with a wide array of films, most of them quite experimental in form and genre. Ross encouraged us to enter each screening without prior knowledge or assumptions about what we were about to see, so that every reaction was genuine and not influenced by external opinions or expectations.
The daunting five-hour class period quickly became a space away from the rest of the world that we all looked forward to, reflecting Ross’s dedication to transforming the classroom into a sacred space. Many courses I took in college often devolved into students talking in circles, or just to hear themselves speak. Due to the sheer amount of discussion time Ross’s class afforded us, especially relative to the size of the group, concepts would inevitably circle back to each other and overlap. But Ross’s laid back, approachable teaching style allowed our thoughts to build upon each other’s, eventually spiraling into new dimensions; rather than talking in circles, we spoke in fractals.
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Ross’s unique directing style holds space for his characters (or in the case of documentary, his subjects) to exist as people and build upon each other’s thoughts, too. Nickel Boys (2024) is Ross’s new adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer prize-winning novel about the friendship between two boys, Elwood (Ethan Herisse) and Turner (Brandon Wilson), at an abusive reform school in the Jim Crow South. Where the film shines is in its use of the camera as its own character. Telling the story directly through the eyes of the protagonist allows the characters to sometimes just exist. This approach humanizes them, inviting you to immerse yourself in their tragic childhood—a heavy and harrowing story that nevertheless contains moments of light and laughter as the two boys navigate adolescence together, speaking to each other in fractals about everything from their families back home to comic books and girls.
Within the first few weeks of the semester, we watched Ross’s directorial debut, Hale County This Morning, This Evening (2018)—an exquisite foray into the Black quotidian in the community of Hale County, Alabama. Ross moved to Alabama in 2009 to teach photography and coach basketball. He told our class that his goal was to film for longer than anyone had ever filmed in that community (he amassed 1300 hours of film), so that he could compile more footage and information than had ever been made available.
At the time, this seemed like a radical act, due to the structures of power in place. As Ross shared with Barry Jenkins during a Q&A at the New York Film Festival on September 29, he arrived in Hale County thinking he knew what images meant and what the community was like, but he quickly realized that he had much to learn, and also to unlearn.
Our class had endless questions for Ross about his vision for this documentary and his experience filming and editing it. When asked how he was possibly allowed to film a woman’s birth, he told us that it wasn’t about access, it was about trust. Trust begets access, and Ross was able to achieve both due to the volume of time he spent with the people of Hale County, and their faith in him not only as a filmmaker, but also as a person.
In certain ways, Ross’s jump to directing a narrative feature film for Plan B (one based on a Pulitzer-winning novel, no less) feels like an abrupt departure from his non-fiction oeuvre. But in fact, it elucidates a seamless transition that recalls the hours of debate we engaged in during class about why what is ‘real’ doesn’t always matter. Ross directs the same way he teaches: with little discernible difference between fact and fiction. What matters is not literal ‘fact,’ but the rawness the storytelling evokes and the larger societal truths it reflects.
In Nickel Boys, the tension between truth and fact exists first in Whitehead’s novel, which takes place at the Nickel Academy, a fictionalized version of the very real Dozier School for Boys. For over a century, Dozier tortured and raped Black boys, then buried their remains in unmarked graves. Archaeology students were still digging up remains and attempting to identify them in 2011, when the school finally closed its doors. This horrifying reality is symbolically depicted in the book and in the film by the “out back” area at Nickel Academy, the dilapidated horse stables where disobedient students were taken to be beaten. At one point in the film, a horse appears inside the halls of the school, but in a dreamlike flash that is not explained further. Alligators and lizards also pop up on screen from time to time. Ross plays with dreamscapes and symbolic surrealism within an environment that often feels like a nightmare. He recently shared in an interview with Cultured Mag, “The images in the film are intentionally symbolic, metaphorical, but also just experiential. If you see it, you see it, but even if you see it, did you really? Do you want it to be there? Do you not want it to be there?”
He continues to challenge conceptions of reality by interspersing archival footage, like film photographs and personal documents, towards the end of the film. This collage of ‘real’ still images makes you feel like you’re seeing photos of the actual people these characters were inspired by—but on a closer look, are they just fabricated to create a documentary-like effect? These questions are never answered (though the images are real Dozier School boys, sourced from the Florida Memory project), but they don’t need to be; whether or not this story represents literal students who lived through these horrors, it is obvious by the end of the film that hundreds, if not thousands, of boys experienced similar fates at similar institutions.
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Ross’s innovative stylistic choice to integrate ‘archival’ images into a narrative film recalls his passion for photography and collage-like filmmaking. Both of Ross’s feature projects reflect his foundation in still photography. He shared with Jenkins that every image he encountered in Hale County contributed to his process of discovery when making the film. Jenkins describes the documentary as “active, yet observational,” and I would attribute the same adjectives to Nickel Boys.
When Ross would lead the class into philosophical tangents about art (as occasionally occurred), his musings often centered around the power held within various imaginaries and archives. I’ll never forget the day we watched La Jetée (1962) in class; I’d seen it for the first time in a high school French class, and again several times since then. I’d already had my revelatory moments about the film. But Ross challenged my perceptions with a single observation: Think about how many different stories you could tell with this exact set of photos. This idea shattered my previous understanding of photography as a medium. I’d always maintained that a photograph proves something to be true, to have existed as specific visual evidence. But as Ross shared in his conversation with Jenkins, “Photography erases our authorship. It feigns to be objective; it feigns to be reality.” The language of photography is simultaneously about being there yet not being there, a notion Ross captures perfectly with the archival moments he intersperses throughout Nickel Boys.
When Ross asks Jenkins, “What would happen if photography was born into a different imaginary?” it felt like something I’d previously heard him ask in class. Photography as a medium has strong Eurocentric origins. And, as Ross shared in that same section of the Q&A, “Photography and film reinscribe reality.” Images often precede our own existences and inform our perceptions of the world. With Nickel Boys, Ross takes a radicalized approach to creating Black images, producing interstitial moments across archives that blur the viewer’s understanding of the hard facts and events contained within the larger cultural and historical narrative. In doing so, he accomplishes something more important than displaying the objective truth: “If you suspend the arc of meaning in a Black image, you are expanding Blackness,” he said.
Like everything Ross touches, his adaptation of Nickel Boys exists on its own terms. It blurs traditional lines of genre and form, yet elicits guttural reactions from its viewers, who experience each intimate frame of film as a window into the tragic lives of Elwood and Turner as they navigate the sinister landscape of Nickel Academy. The narrative maintains a first-person point of view—a choice some would deem audacious—yet Ross takes this tool that often results in gimmickry and turns it into a profound perspective, elevating the exploration and recognition of the Black experience to the next level by forcing us to see everything through the protagonists’ eyes. By using this uniquely intimate technique, Ross enables a tragic historical story to still feel hopeful.
Slightly akin to Jonathan Glazer’s genius sound design in The Zone of Interest (2023), which allows viewers to hear the atrocities being committed by Nazis as background noise to the Auschwitz commandant’s idyllic family life in the Polish countryside, the first-person perspective in Nickel Boys enables no periphery. We understand the evil forces at play in this reform school, but Ross’s intentional withholding of most exterior violence and abuse for the sake of maintaining Elwood’s first-person perspective only makes the story more heartbreaking as it unfolds. We know the course of history and the darkness ahead for him, but through his eyes we watch him fall in love, work hard in school, and appreciate art and the joys of being young. All the while, nausea builds like a pit in your stomach over his possible fate. The negative space seeps with the violence and cruelty that remains implied but largely unseen.
Many would leap to categorize Ross as an “experimental filmmaker,” and some already have. But as stated in his Instagram bio, he prefers to steer clear of the potentially pejorative term “experimental” in favor of identifying as a “liberated documentarian.” Regardless of language, though, he admitted to Jenkins that Nickel Boys was undoubtedly an experiment.
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So much of “Other Lives of Time” depended on our willingness as students to lean into discomfort and embrace the contradictions inherent to photography and filmmaking. During a critique of films made by students in our class, Ross said, “If you want [your film] to be powerful, you have to be willing to risk the viewer missing the point completely.” It’s a brave risk to take, but it certainly paid off for Ross. I wouldn’t be surprised if some viewers walk away from Nickel Boys dumbfounded, or a bit confused by some of the narrative; certain artistic intricacies are sure to get lost in translation. But regardless of which messages ultimately come across to viewers, the film itself is full of images and tiny moments that are impossible to forget.
Ross taught us that labeling something a documentary predisposes the viewer to an encounter with the truth. He believes that genre holds power when you’re conscious about it. Nickel Boys is remarkably attentive to its exploration of genre, medium, and form, allowing Ross to gracefully transition from documentary to narrative drama. It’s one of the most inventive, impactful films I’ve seen in recent memory, and one that just might create a paradigm shift in the world of narrative film.