RAVEN JACKSON on ALL DIRT ROADS TASTE OF SALT – Nadine Whitney interviews
Poet, photographer, and filmmaker Raven Jackson’s debut feature All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt is the story of the life of Mack from childhood to later life. Jackson’s tender mosaic of childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and older age is impressionistic and non-linear. Specific and universal – All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt is rich and nourishing.
Nadine Whitney spoke to Raven Jackson at the Melbourne International Film Festival.
Nadine Whitney: When you wrote All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt did you catalogue stories from not only your family but other people you know? How much of it works in imagination and how much of it is something that that you reached from personal experience?
Raven Jackson: I grew up in Tennessee, but my mother is from Mississippi. There where places we shot that existed when I visited as a child. I do so much with lineage was passed from generation to generation. It was another layer of me having a conversation with my own film in my own language. I hold Mississippi close – the people the land. I have a love for Mississippi and its people
It’s a fiction film first and foremost but there are a lot of emotional truth or truths in like the details for instance, the clay dirt eating aspect. I had a lot of conversations with my family but the most significant conversations with my paternal grandmother around eating clay dirt. The conversation and the scene in the film where Grandma Betty and young Josie and Mack are talking about it is a lot of that conversation; some of the lines are pulled from a conversation I had with my grandma.
I grew up fishing. Some of the photographs on the walls are photographs from my Grandma’s albums and some photographs are from Charlene Maclure’s or her mother. So, it’s a fiction film but there are certainly emotional truths in the film and also physical truths.
I have an older sister; I think it’s such a special relationship. I wanted to show the tenderness and the love that sisterhood holds in the film. The film doesn’t lean into dialogue in a deep way, and I wanted to show just in this bond like in a lot of ways where they, you know, connect without words. It’s just like an unspoken deep bond. It felt really important for me to have two sisters who are there for each other. Who are holding and supporting other throughout their lives and the many ways that shows itself throughout the film.
NW: How would you like the film to reach other people?
RJ: I made a film with the aim for it to be an experience and so I hope that if anyone is interested in, you know, receiving a story that isn’t told and the traditional way, though there’s certainly a story there it’s just taking a different route, I think it could be a film of interest. All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt is a film about life. It’s about the seasons of our lives. The ways we change as people through our lives. It’s about love and nature. It’s about the many complex emotions we experience in life. I hope people come to watch the film and allow Mack’s story to wash over them, the life of another woman, it resonates with them in ways that maybe was not anticipated.
