This is FRESH air.
I'm Tonya Moseley and today my guest is filmmaker Rommel Ross.
His adaptation of Colson Whitehead's Pulitzer Prize winning novel the Nickel Boys is nominated for an Academy Award for best adapted screenplay and for best picture.
It tells the story of two Black teenagers in 1960s Florida as they attempt to survive and escape a brutal reformatory academy.
The story is loosely based on the real life Dozier School for Boys, which was a notorious place for its brutal treatment of students.
Ross's approach to this story is really unlike anything most viewers have ever experienced.
The film is shot almost entirely from the perspectives of the two protagonists, Elwood and Turner.
Ross turns the camera into what he calls an organ by attaching body mounted cameras and filming the scene continuously with Unbroken Takes.
The outcome for the viewer feels like being both Elwood and Turner.
Now I introduced Romel Ross as a filmmaker, but really this title is too narrow.
He's also a photographer, a Brown University professor and a writer.
A former Georgetown basketball recruit sidelined by injuries, Ross pivoted to sociology and English before honing his visual language rooted in what he calls liberated documentation.
His 2018 Academy Award nominated documentary, Hale county this Morning, this Evening is an ethnographic story told through fractured vignettes of black Southern life and it won a Peabody Award for documentary in 2019.
Ramel Ross, welcome to FRESH AIR.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks so much.
Elwood Curtis, who is played by Ethan Harisi, is a bright, idealistic teenager who lives with his grandmother, played by Angenue Ellis Taylor.
And while on his way to college, he gets caught up and wrongfully accused of something and sent to Nickel Academy, which is this reformatory that he'll soon learn is really a house of horrors.
In the scene I like to play, Elwood is in the infirmary recovering from this beating at the hands of this school's corrupt white administrator, Spencer, and he's punished for trying to stop a fight.
So Elwood is arguing with his cynical friend Turner, played by Brandon Wilson, about whether the civil rights movement will bring about change.