“If our lives were to flood, what are the moments that would rise to the surface?” That’s the central question that swirled around in Raven Jackson’s mind, inspiring her feature-length directorial debut All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt.
With All Dirt Roads, Jackson — a native Tennessean — beautifully captures the “emotional journey” of her protagonist Mack, who is portrayed by three actresses throughout the course of the film. The audience is taken on a visceral and immersive journey through the defining moments of Mack’s life, from birth to death and places in between, including her first kiss. It’s a fragmented portrait of Black Southern girlhood and womanhood that fluidly shifts between different periods in the protagonist’s life. Jackson is masterfully in control of the time and pace of this thought-provoking debut, which thrives in its unconventional structure.
“I was intentional with the placement of different portraits [of Mack at different ages] to create a forward movement with the film,” Jackson tells the Scene. “I thought of it like water, which is an important image in the film, and the fluid way that water moves. I’m trying to fluidly move the film forward.”
The script, which Jackson wrote, was merely a starting point. The movie started to fully take shape during production. The filmmaker says it can be “uncomfortable sitting in the unknown,” but she has developed “a deep trust in the process” to effectively create a purposeful emotionality in each scene.
“I know what I’m looking for,” she says. “If I’m on set I certainly have it in me to be rigid, but I work best when I’m loose and see what’s unfolding in front of me. That’s what the edit was asking for, to be loose and see what footage we have. Yes, it can work in the script, but does it work in the film? Being open to that is very important.”
Jackson says that while making All Dirt Roads, she further developed the skills she had acquired when directing short films, but she also used her background as a poet to create something lyrical and intentional with sound and language.
“I wanted to allow the body to do most of the speaking in this film through body language, silence, gesture and the soundscape,” she says. “I knew going in that I didn’t want to rely on dialogue.
“Poetry helps me trust the talking that’s happening when folks aren’t talking with their mouths. There is a lot that is being communicated, even if folks aren’t talking.”
For All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt, Jackson drew upon some of her own experiences growing up in the South, as well as conversations with family members. The movie transports the audience via an immersive natural soundscape and depictions of Southern traditions like eating clay and fishing for catfish, which Jackson did as a child along the Cumberland River.
These are the moments and places Jackson missed when she moved to New York to study poetry, where she was initially hit with culture shock.
“It made me miss the pace of the South, or something as simple as seeing fireflies,” says Jackson. “There’s nature and parks in New York, but it’s different. It made me appreciate where I come from even more. I don’t think everything I do will be in the South, but a large proportion of it will be. I recognized that for myself when I moved to New York — how much love I have for where I come from.”
Jackson now lives in Los Angeles, but says the South will always have a big place in her heart, and filming in Mississippi reinforced that love.
“It feels like home in a real way, not only the places but also the people. That was special in the process of making this film, that feeling of home.”
Following its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in January, Jackson’s debut went on to screen at some of the biggest film festivals globally over the course of 2023, from London and New York to San Sebastian, Spain, and the Nashville Film Festival in October. This week it opens at the Belcourt.
“It’s been a long journey — it has taken five years to get the film to this point, and now it hits theaters,” Jackson says. “It feels like a lot of chapters to bring the film to the world, but truly I’m so excited for more folks to be able to watch it, and I look forward to the many conversations I anticipate happening after more people do.”
