A Stunning Meditation on Memory, All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt Dips Its Fingers into the River of Time

Raven Jackson’s debut feature, All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt, has a southern sense of memory that I adore. It’s not that the coming-of-age film—which ambles around Mississippi, dipping its fingers into the sun-warmed river of time—is full of particulars. At least, not like that usually means. There aren’t any Whataburgers or Ward’s, no recognizable football teams or radio-favorite needledrops. In fact, the movie is so poetic as to be nearly faceless, which means it could apply to so many of us. But it’s all specific to its central force.

An opening moment sees young Mack (Kaylee Nicole Johnson) fishing with her father. It’s quiet, simple. Slow enough to allow memories of my own dad taking me fishing to bubble to the surface of my consciousness. The delicacy and patience, the youthful aggravation tainting the natural sensations all around. The film encourages this kind of dual awareness, where you hold both this movie’s memories and your own in your mind, and asks for the same kind of patience and quiet dedication as a parent on a fishing trip. If you assent, All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt is endlessly rewarding, a tactile sense-memory tapestry of all the things that matter.

There’s very little dialogue in All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt. Needless sentences are replaced by Black hands, running over each other, running through silt, touching cool truck metal, or reeling in rope. It frames hands more often than anything else, using an elliptical structure and a camera fascinated with touch in order to evoke the language of memories. You can’t smell or feel anything when you watch a movie, and those sensations are perhaps the strongest stimulations of the past. An embrace, a breeze, a humid and beating sun—these call up days spent with childhood crushes or summers running amok. They smell like sweat and the sweet-decay medley of nature. Jackson’s thankfully not working in Smell-O-Vision, so tactile images of familiar textures and strange details help make up for the senses she can’t reach.

That’s how you remember things, right? It’s not just that you remember where you were when you learned that someone close to you died, it’s that you remember that you were wearing an older pair of socks that you’d been meaning to throw out because one had a hole in the big toe. Your heart was breaking, and your toe was cold. Jackson taps into that unique quirk of our strange minds. Mack weathers death and heartbreak, radiates joy and love. But what makes the big Hallmark emotions hit are the minutiae. A monarch butterfly lazily beating its wings on the cracked tan leather of a car’s seat. Red ribbons erupt from black hair like mini lava plumes.

Mack’s life plays out poetically. She (mostly played by Charleen McClure, with Johnson and Zainab Jah taking on her youth and old age) and her childhood friend Wood (as an adult, played by Reginald Helms Jr.) go through milestones together and apart. A house burns down, a kiss is shared. Wood moves on, Mack stays behind. He returns, Mack is waiting. And, in every moment, touch grounds her and sounds consume her. All the actors are restrained; content or not, they stare, hug, slump, climb. Words aren’t what stick with you anyways.