Hale County This Morning, This Evening

Whittled down to a lean, mean 80 minutes from a reported 1300 hours of footage shot over several years, director RaMell Ross's first film documents life, love, dreams and death in the small Alabama town where he once worked as a teacher and high-school basketball coach. The Oscar-nominated film focuses via a string of short "snapshot" sequences on three of the inhabitants of this disenfranchised and predominantly black town: teen ball players Daniel and Quincy, and Boosie, the mother of Quincy's children. It's a fascinating portrait of people and place. But its unconventional structure and its lack of plot and pace make it niche material for the more adventurous movie watcher rather than the multiplex regular. Certainly, it's about as far removed as you can get from the latest Hollywood blockbuster. But, then again, it's also pleasing proof of the sheer spectrum of material that cinema can accommodate.