In All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt, we see more hands than faces. The feature debut of writer-director Raven Jackson, All Dirt Roads lets us simmer in the memories of an adult woman named Mack who grew up in rural Mississippi. The movie drifts from early moments fishing with her mother, father, and sister to teen years of tentative flirtation to single pregnancy as a young adult. All Dirt Roads doesn’t move chronologically, but rather slides in and out and among time, in the same manner that our memories come to us: unbidden, unexpected, peppered with details but often little context. Here, those details almost always involve hands: a young Mack (Kaylee Nicole Johnson) stroking the scales of a recently caught fish; teen Mack (Charleen McClure) hesitantly holding a boy’s hand; adult Mack (McClure again) and her sister (Moses Ingram) sharing the blanketed weight of her newborn child. These intimate insert shots are so dominant that when the film pulls back to reveal a medium or wide shot, it’s almost shocking. (One striking tableau, of teenagers posing amidst the low, horizontal branches of a tree, suggests one of the film’s likely influences: Julie Dash’s magnificent Daughters of the Dust.) Jackson is also a poet, and All Dirt Roads recalls other works of cinematic poetry—think Terrence Malick—not only in its imagery but also the rhyming of its editing, as when we cut from a shot of the teen sisters practicing kissing on their hands to a shot of their mother (Sheila Atim) putting on lipstick. The sound design is equally sophisticated, emphasizing the presence of birds and bugs and—traumatically at some moments, restoratively at others—hard rain (often, unsurprisingly, falling upon open hands). A work of astonishing tactility, All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt reminds us that what we remember—what might matter most as corporeal beings—is not word or even story, but touch.
(10/30/2023)
