Hale County, jour après jour

This film is beautifully shot, and there are some stunning images in it, but I would not call it a documentary. There is barely a noticeable narrative and for me a documentary has to have a narrative otherwise you could call Andy Warhol's Empire a documentary. It's the kind of film you could imagine passing in a gallery exhibition, watching for five minutes, and walking on. In that respect I can't really recommend it but I thought a 6/10 was fair as it succeeds in what it sets out to do and my lack of enjoyment of it was based partially on expectations.

Undeniably well made, this documentary focuses on the residents of this small town and shows their lives. However, i did eventually lose interest in it as there really isnt much forward momentum in the storytelling.

I saw that this documentary received very high praise from pro critics, but it's not my cup of tea. From what I read, the young director RaMell Ross , making his feature debut, shot 1300 hours of footage over 5 years and was looking more in this presentation to be poetic and lyrical rather than offer a cohesive storyline.

As Ross depicts day-to-day life in a small predominately African-American town in Alabama, there are certainly some striking images here One segment of the movie is just completely sad and shocking. But the film was just too disjointed and fragmented to appeal to me on the whole.

This is a curious movie with practically no acting performers but showing with realist scenes, images and talks the real life of a black community in Alabama Hale County. It's vivid and lively and we can see how that people lives and talks and fights and suffers drama or enjoy something like playing basketball for instance. It is a pleasant movie to watch since it disposes us well with these people's lives like if we were living with them indeed. It's seldom that we see a movie of this kind looking like a documentary with no plot or special action. It disposes us well and it is very well directed and edited.

As the title implies, days in the lives of the residents of Hale County, Alabama are chronicled in this documentary. Most of the residents are poor and black.

Director RaMell Ross has chosen a cinema-vérité or fly-on-the-wall approach which works often though not always. It works very well on scenes involving small children including the story of a family with twin babies. Sadly, many scenes linger too long and this film has less effect than a similar documentary also released in 2018: "Minding the Gap". The other film dug deeper in covering similar situations including the struggles of economic hardship for those already disadvantaged.

The pacing of "Hale County...." could have been improved though its laid-back approach can be credited for creating a peaceful mood.