Sundance 2023: All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt, Fancy Dance, The Starling Girl | Festivals & Awards

Jackson moves through the life of a young woman in the rural South in different phases of her life, allowing for a kind of poetic logic from one sequence to the next. She sets the tone with a long scene of two sisters fishing with their father, the camera focusing on the hands much more than the faces: a hand holding a rod, touching a fish, pushing the river bed, etc. She will come back again and again. into her hands, using them to highlight the connections between these people and the natural world around them. Her hands dig into the ground. Her hands tentatively hold as she walks. Her hands pat the back during a hug. She often frames people from behind, showing the back of their heads as if we were walking with them down a dirt road. It’s a crisp, confident visual language that connects these people to the world around them and to each other through something that feels incredibly specific to the moment and easily relatable.

And then there’s Jackson’s sound design, dominated by the natural world and sparingly used of score. No, the “music” in this film comes from cicadas or rain falling on a roof. Again, it becomes more of a memory than a reality or even a dream. Most of us can remember days in the natural world when we were young. And you can almost smell the air in this film, a truly impressive achievement at a festival where that kind of ambitious tonal cinema is rare.

In the end, Jackson’s camera becomes almost like a character in “All Dirt…