Rating: PG | Runtime: 92 minutes
Release Date: November 3rd, 2023 (USA)
Studio: A24
Director(s): Raven Jackson
Writer(s): Raven Jackson

All these drops might be a river someday. Might be snow. Might be in you.

If there’s a lead character in Raven Jackson’s visually poetic ensemble All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt spanning multiple decades while depicting four generations of a Mississippi family, it’s Mack (played by Kaylee Nicole Johnson in adolescence and Charleen McClure in adulthood). She’s our entry point into its world of memory—daughter to Isaiah (Chris Chalk) and Evelyn (Sheila Atim), sister to Josie (played by Jayah Henry in adolescence and Moses Ingram in adulthood), and granddaughter to Betty (Jannie Hampton). She’s whose perspective we take as our own to watch as time folds in upon itself to tell a story connected by emotion and the senses (Jackson and cinematographer Jomo Fray intentionally labeled these thematic transitions as “slant rhymes”) of tragedy, uncertainty, and hope.

We therefore move from a teenage Mack flirting with Wood (Reginald Helms Jr.) upon one of the many dirt roads traveled to young Josie teaching a young Mack how to practice kissing with her hand. Then we’re suddenly fast-forwarded to adulthood for a reunion between Mack and Wood, years since their last meeting, that holds all the love we can infer from the prior romantic moments as well as the pain of that which we’ve yet to witness. Jackson will bring us there soon as new life ultimately mirrors unfathomable loss—one soul replaced by another with an unforeseen complexity pushed even further so that its impact can prove as powerful to the audience as it is to the characters on-screen.

You cannot watch the film without thinking of Terrence Malick. Jackson mentions Days of Heaven as an inspiration, but I kept thinking about The Tree of Life due to the gorgeously rendered vignettes of otherwise mundane familial keepsakes. Young Mack sitting on the floor in awe of her mother and father dancing at a party. A prolonged close-up of Betty’s hands as she speaks with her grandchildren about earth and water and mankind’s origins. The tear-streaked embrace between Mack and Wood that exorcises the demons of regret and longing to remind them that no amount of distance can truly sever the bond their spirits share. Most of these scenes are wordless. Some are accompanied by ambient noise like rains drops, others with song.

To me it feels like how I’d imagine one’s life flashing before their eyes would unfold. Long scenes and short scenes cross-cut together, bridging the gap between life and death or love and loss with either a deft smoothness or jarringly aural snap to attention. It’s like Mack’s explanation of water to a young Lily—how it has neither a beginning nor an end. It recycles through its numerous stages just like humans do with the dirt beneath their feet, each patch of land or blade of grass holding the essence of what came before much like we do our ancestors. We keep their love and light within us. We’re forever guided by their words and actions. And we’re bound to their legacy even if our place within it has been shifted from one hand to the next. To have that truth told with such honest, heartfelt devotion is a balm for the soul.

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Photography courtesy of Sundance.