The Ten Best Films of 2023 | Features

Runner-ups: “About Dry Grasses,” “All of Us Strangers,” “Anatomy of a Fall,” “The Boy and the Heron,” “Fallen Leaves,” “Godland,” “Kokomo City,” “Priscilla,” “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-verse,” and “A Thousand and One“

10. “All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt“

Watching Raven Jackson‘s debut feature film, “All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt” (produced by Barry Jenkins and developed through the Indie Memphis Black Filmmaker Residency for Screenwriting), is one of those startling cinematic experiences calling into question how filmmakers typically tell stories. We don’t realize the dominance of visual cliches until a filmmaker comes along and does it her own way. Chantal Akerman did it with “Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles,” Julie Dash did it with “Daughters of the Dust,” Lynne Ramsay did it with “Morvern Callar“. Their cinematic language is as distinct as a fingerprint. 

The kaleidoscope of images in “All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt” shows the past existing alongside the present, memories bleeding forwards and backwards. Repeating sensory motifs rush forth in this story of a young girl growing up in the rural South: hands touching the dirt, preparing a fishhook, braiding hair, trailing through the river water, a mother’s hands washing her daughter’s back, loved ones clasped in wordless embraces. You get to know everyone through their hands, as radical a style as Terrence Malick’s sunlight-through-tree-leaves and whispering voiceovers. “All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt” is a kinesthetic experience. You see smells, feel sounds, dirt roads are to be tasted. Of course, Jackson also gives us memorable characters, steeping us in the family’s grief and joy, loss and sweetness. 

Raven Jackson is also a published poet. One of her poems, “After the Fire,” opens with:

Plants Mama should have swallowed as seeds
swelled from mud like crippled

legs. She’d sit on the porch, a green jar of pickles
bouncing on her knees, tires
eating stone.

The sensibility of “All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt” are in those evocative words. Jackson has made a film only she could make. It can’t be duplicated. It is hers and it is to be treasured. (Sheila O’Malley)

Now streaming on:

9. “Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret.”

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