As a teenager growing up in Fairfax, Virginia, with a basketball scholarship to Georgetown in hand, film was barely on the mind of RaMell Ross.
“As I remember, I spent most of my days in Northern Virginia outside skateboarding, rollerblading, playing basketball, just kind of being a kid,” Ross told WAMU All Things Considered host Tamika Smith.
Ross had stellar freshman year at Georgetown and even had ambitions of pursuing a career in the NBA. But two unforeseen crises, unfolding simultaneously, forced his life into a much different direction.
“My mother passing away and losing basketball, I lost my first two loves around the same time,” RaMell said. He was sidelined with injuries his final years at Georgetown and his mother passed away during his senior year. After these two life changing losses, Ross found a way to ground himself and find meaning – through the art of photography.
Now he’s the director of two award-winning feature length films and an Associate Professor of Visual Arts at Brown University.
His latest film, “Nickel Boys”, tells the story of two young Black men in 1960s Florida attempting to survive a brutal reformatory academy. The film is adapted from the Pulitzer Prize winning book “The Nickel Boys” by Colson Whitehead.
The book is based on the real Dozier School for Boys where hundreds of young men were murdered and assaulted over the course of the 20th century. Mass grave sites were uncovered in just the past two decades.
Ross takes a unique approach with the cinematography, showing a dystopian world through the eyes of the two protagonists, Turner and Elwood. Viewers experience this story from the characters’ first-hand perspective. Ross believes this will lead them to empathize with and also internalize the their experience.
“What happens when the camera becomes an organ? What happens when you’re using the camera inside of the body and not outside of the body? Subjectivity, because of the way the camera has been used is really not often given to characters, very rarely given to historical characters and never given necessarily to people of color,” Ross explained.
When Ross isn’t working on his next creative project or teaching students in Rhode Island, he can be found in a Piper Cherokee 180 single engine plane, on track to get his pilot’s license. Much of his work centers on the Black experience in America, which is filled with both physical and psychological oppression. Ross says for him, flying is a way to be free.
“The amount of agency, the amount of free will that you have, you’ll never feel like you’ll have more free will then when you’re flying a plane.”
“Nickel Boys” is available in theaters this January and will be available soon on MGM+ and Prime Video. It is nominated for two Academy Awards, one for Best Adapted Screenplay and one for Bets Picture.