Movie Recommendation: All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt

Dir. Raven Jackson, 2023

I don't watch movies with the mindset of providing a critical review or seeking movies to write about. Rather these recommendation posts reflect moments I finished watching a movie and felt driven to tell the world about it!

I only recommend movies I'm excited about and eager for you to see.

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Sometimes you can judge a movie by its title. This title spoke to me. It said that the filmmaker had something poetic in mind. In fact it’s a full, feature-length cinepoem, and released by a popular (albeit indie) studio to boot.

Amazing. Movies like All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt certainly exist, but usually are relegated to small label obscurity. And that’s just from the format — this one is also black women lead and helmed. I’m not the type of person who follows the politics of this stuff, but perhaps Barry Jenkins did a lot of pushing in A24 to make this come about. If that’s the case, this movie is an instance where one exciting, distinct voice in the industry can lead to some remarkable new talent making fresh and original art in the right circumstances. Regardless, Raven Jackson’s talent definitely deserves the platform.

This movie has plotpoints and a character arc, but narrative is definitely secondary to poetics. And All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt is very poetic, weaving a rhythmic series of images and sounds into an array of memories, impressionistic moments, and extremely refined details to describe the relationship two sisters have with their mother and a shared daughter, and how community and folk knowledge leads and guides them.

And so the word to settle on to describe this movie is sensual. Listen: movies generally live in senses of sight and sound. Touch is relatively easy to get into with the use of textural photography and close-ups. Taste more difficult but often relies on wafting steam and brightly colored food.

This movie pulls off all those senses but it also pulls off scent. Scent is extremely difficult to represent in film, one of the reasons why Perfume: The Story of a Murderer is interesting. Most of the time scent in film is an extremely dirty, wetly decayed area that a character enters and suddenly covers their nose. When it doesn’t work, I find it distracting.

You can smell the scents in this film, from the rainy petrichor to the cologne and perfumed shirts during an embrace to the fresh fish at a brook. Maybe this is the weirdest possible way for me to get you to see this movie, but I’m just saying it’s incredible work.

All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt also has a remarkable amount of choreography around hugs. Again, sounds silly but it’s actually amazing how much storytelling is told around how two people hold each other and where their hands and heads move and so forth. In one shot the hug reveals a wedding ring that immediately clarifies the drama going on there — such extremely stripped down storytelling happens throughout, with single images sometimes representing entire memories or relationships.

The flipside of the “I can’t believe a studio as big as A24 actually distributed this movie” is that I am also realistic and understand that there is not a large audience for it. Accordingly, I haven’t seen any advertising for it, whereas usually the ad algos have me tapped for every indie distributor flick released on a weekly basis. All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt might end up harder to find than other A24 releases, but I urge you try to catch a screening if possible. It’s an amazing production.

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