RaMell Ross

I think people should digest work, not encounter it. You need to bring it in. You need to eat it.

Faith is something, of course, that exists because you don't need evidence for it by faith itself.

Black folks aren't asked to make films about all white people. But what would have happened if we did? What would white culture look like to them if we were doing that?

Micro-looking processes that are human are what I was interested in. How can you use the camera to mime the way that we look? The way we look has almost been bastardized by film and photography.

Given the time-based relationship to making a movie, it's often not efficient to spend copious amounts of time filming and waiting for meaning and other things to emerge naturally without pursuing them.

I sort of have a rigid sensibility. I know what I want.

It's an interesting thing - that film fills in for history - because I think it's both one of the most beautiful and active elements of it, but it's also one of the most terrifying. Because film - even in the documentary space, unfortunately - is so tied to industry. It's so tied to career.

Ideas are always the source of the work. The form needs to emerge from the idea, not be top-down.

There's this preconception that people don't want to see interesting things. Because this film gets rejected, or this film isn't embraced, it's easy to become an echo chamber for big studios.

I didn't go to art school. I was a basketball scholarship, student-athlete, and both my parents were in the military. I had a very American-programmed,, uncritical relationship to images and cultural production.

Trauma - that violence ripples forever.

You know, I feel like when we're watching films, typically, the films do the thinking for you, one could say.

To be Black is the greatest fiction of my life. Yet I'm still bound to its myth. I can't help but think about the myth's childhood in its backyard of the South, how the myth of Blackness aged into fact and grew into laws.

My relationship to photography and film is knowledge production, and it's how to engage with the world in a way that approximates the complexity of the world - not the desire to have an experience of it that makes you feel good or is just fundamentally narrative.

I think making a film and making a TV show and using images illustratively and telling the story through images is different from having the audience experience the narrative through images. You know, they're two completely different things.

Christianity is integral to not only the culture and black culture at large, but also the survival of black people at large. That faith, while sometimes complicated - and Christianity, of course, is complicated because it's often used to subjugate in some moments - but then also is a way to survive subjugation.

I think, with the balance of personal narrative, narrative continuity, and aesthetics, I always lean into what's interesting to me.

You can be doing something and you have your narrative in your head, but that only means that to you - there's also another way to interpret it clearly.

I think of all concepts I've ever encountered, I think the one that's most mysterious is afrofuturism and afrosurrealism because I feel like that's the nature of being a Black person.

I had wanted to make a point-of-view film for a long time.