SLIFF Review: “All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt”

Hands. That’s the first thing you notice about Raven Jackson’s debut feature film All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt: the close-up of Mack’s hands as she runs them through the river water, sifting through the dirt with her fingers, as her father Isaiah (Chris Chalk) teaches her how to fish, patiently telling her to go slow, take her time. Mack (played here by Kaylee Nicole Johnson) is a young Black girl growing up in rural Mississippi. Time, like the rest of Jackson’s film that follows, is slippery here; the set and costume design and music of a scene soon after that finds Mack lying on the floor of her home listening to records while her parents dance suggests sometime in the 70s, but ultimately, those specifics don’t matter. All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt jumps back and forth between moments of Mack’s life in a non-linear fashion, unfolding less as a coming-of-age story and more like snatches of memory as we alternate between Mack as a young girl, Mack as a teenager, Mack as an adult (in the latter two she’s played by Charleen McClure) and Mack as a gray-haired older woman (Zainab Jah).

Jackson’s piercing 2018 short film Nettles— 24 minutes divided into six stories of moments in different women’s lives; you can currently stream it on the Criterion Channel— gives viewers a taste of what can be expected from All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt. Jackson isn’t interested in exposition or feeding her audience clear details of her characters’ lives; like memory, everything is a little hazy (Jomo Fray’s warm 35 mm cinematography amplifies this feeling). But we understand enough: the untimely death of a mother (Evelyn, played by the striking Sheila Atim), a house fire, first and ultimately unrequited love, the need to relinquish a child. Jackson anchors these scenes that otherwise might have been left too freely floating for viewers to grasp on to primarily in McClure and her expressive face and quietly strong demeanor and Mack’s relationship with her sister Josie (played by Jayah Henry as a child and the great Moses Ingram as an adult), which seems to transcend the typical sibling bonds as they share these moments in time together, both big (weddings, births, deaths) and small (a first kiss, a gathering around the kitchen table to scale fish, working through each other’s hair).

Jackson’s film is the epitome of poetry as cinema, and she conveys this not only in the movie’s structure but its repetition of specific images throughout the course of its runtime: specifically, those hands. Close-ups of hands are just as integral, if not more so, than close-ups of faces in All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt. Hands working, hands caressing, hands seeking connection and strength in others through touch. Jackson takes her time, allowing her camera to linger on these moments for long stretches; one shot in particular of Mack desperately holding on to Wood (Reginald Helms Jr.), her friend and previous lover, stays with the characters so long we start to become aware of the voyeurism inherent in peering in on such a private, heartfelt moment. Water is another symbol that links all these scenes, and is something that Mack seems to have a personal connection to; she’s always outside watching the rain, an observation voiced by the other characters. We see water’s association with fertility and rebirth literally play out on screen in scenes echo each other across the years: Mack tracing her hands over her pregnant belly as she lays in the bath, Mack’s mother bathing her in the same bathtub when she was a child, Mack fishing with her father as a child and sitting by what appears to be the same river as an older woman. For those ready and willing to go on this journey, All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt holds an embarrassment of riches waiting to be uncovered, reveling in tangible, simple pleasures and the relationships to home and family that bind us all together, specific to Mack yet recognizably universal. Right out of the gate, Jackson proves to possess a firm grasp of the visual language of film and a voice that is clear, strong, and true.

All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt screened at the St. Louis International Film Festival on November 11 and is currently playing in select theaters nationwide. Runtime: 92 minutes. Rated PG.