The director sets out to paint a picture of African American life (focussed on two young men, one a basketball player and the other factory worker) in the rural and primarily black community of Hale County, Alabama, by letting his camera run over five years and showing us pieces, both important and mundane, of these young men’s, and their community’s, existence. A plot is not a main concern here — the pictures are the main attraction. Unfortunately, the film`s approach didn`t move me to a good emotional sense of the lives focussed on. Perhaps that`s just me. (Hale County was the setting for a 1940s book about sharecroppers during the Depression, which contained pictures of these hard done by folks that became relatively well-known.)
