One of the most visually striking and profoundly moving American moviemaking debuts in years, Raven Jackson’s All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt is an arresting immersion into a young woman’s inner world, filmed and edited with an extraordinary tactility and attention.

A lyrical, decades-spanning exploration across a woman’s life in Mississippi, this remarkable film from award-winning poet, photographer, and filmmaker Raven Jackson is a touching and richly layered portrait, a beautiful ode to the generations of people and places that shape us. Using only minimal dialogue and foregrounding impressionistic sound and images, this immersive journey into the life of Mackenzie (Mack), a young Southern Black woman’s thoughts which showcases personal storytelling at its most stunning.

Richard Brody from the New Yorker says that All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt “is a comprehensively imagined and realized film, each of its elements brought to life with originality, inspiration, and a sense of beauty. The result is a film that feels like a world come alive—or, rather, two worlds, Jackson’s inner one and the outer one of shared experience.”

Jackson immerses the audience in a cinematic fable that pays homage to a complex web of individuals, locations, and experiences that shape the intricacies of the human existence. Employing minimal dialogue, immaculate sound design, and a carefully calibrated blend of stunning vignettes, the film explores themes of morality, relationships, love, heartbreak, and the art of storytelling itself. Her work often explores landscapes of indefinable experiences and emotions, as well as the body’s relationship to nature.

This film premiered at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival and should be nominated for Best Original Screenplay, Best Cinematography, Sound Design and Film Editing.