‘All Dirt Roads Taste Of Salt’: London Review

Dir/scr: Raven Jackson. US. 2023. 97 mins

There’s a lyrical, impressionistic quality to All Dirt Roads Taste Of Salt, a fragmented, non-linear portrait that dips into various points in the life of a Black woman from Tennessee. It’s a life captured in intensely felt moments rather than deliberate plot points. With its rhythms and visual rhymes, and its richly symbolic imagery, this distinctive feature debut is steeped in poetry, even though words are used sparsely in the film. This is perhaps not surprising, given that the writer and director, Tennessee native Raven Jackson, started as a poet and photographer before turning her hand to filmmaking

Pieced together like a memory mosaic

Like Jackson’s short film Nettles, this is filmmaking that embraces a meditative slow-cinema approach. As such, it might prove challenging for audiences outside of the festival circuit – the film premiered in Sundance and screened in London following competition slots in global festivals. The involvement of A24 and Barry Jenkins’ name in the producer credits will help draw wider audiences for this haunting and gently experimental picture, which establishes Jackson as a distinctive talent to watch for the future.

The life of Mack (short for Mackenzie) is captured from infancy – she is shown as a baby, cradled in the arms of her mother Evelyn (Sheila Atim) – through childhood, played by Kaylee Nicole Johnson, to adulthood, inhabited over several decades by Charleen McClure. But rather than focus on the big emphatic milestones, Jackson focuses on less showily significant instances – this, after all, is the way that memory often works. We see Mack learning to fish with her father, hanging out with a childhood friend named Wood. We see Mack and her sister driving home from their mother’s funeral in the back of a pickup truck. But we don’t know the circumstances of her death.

In this approach, the film has a certain kinship with Richard Linklater’s Boyhood: stillness, fleeting connections, sudden overwhelming impressions, the moments after the drama rather than the drama itself are the elements that are foregrounded in place of the more conventional plot points. Unlike Boyhood, however, this is not a film that adheres strictly to a linear timeline. Mack’s life is shattered into fragments and, rather than reassembled into its original shape, it’s pieced together like a memory mosaic. 

What’s particularly distinctive about Jackson’s approach - and arguably what imbues the picture with its noticeably female perspective - is the focus on tactile connections with the world and other people. Cinematographer Jomo Fray’s sensitive lens picks out tiny intimate details of skin brushing against skin, hands clasped together, fingers dug into soil and mud. Long, luxuriant embraces are a recurring motif. Each is held for uninterrupted minutes; each one is charged with emotion. And every time, the register of the emotion is slightly different. 

Elsewhere, the camera lingers on moments of contact with the natural world. An opening shot of a gasping fish, held carefully in a child’s hand, tells us volumes about Mack and her empathetic connection with the world around her. Later, the young Mack and her mother dig in the dirt by the roadside – the earth, Mack’s grandmother explains, together with water, is the essence of life, it’s what, she says, Tennessee folks are made of. The use of sound is equally potent, with motifs such as the rattling crescendo of cicadas and the ominous rumble of thunder both repeated on numerous occasions in the film.

The thunder invariably heralds rain, which is one of the film’s other key preoccupations. Water – in the form of the river, the storms, the tears that are shed – has a central symbolic role in the film. Water endures, explains the older Mack to a teenage girl, but changes form over time. You could say the same about love.