Latest news with #NickelAcademy
Hindustan Times
13-05-2025
- Hindustan Times
Page to screen: The Nickel Boys
Subjugation, not education, is the cornerstone of Nickel Academy, a reform school for young offenders in America's Jim Crow South. Crushing the spirit overrides igniting the minds of Black students kept separate and unequal on campus. The default language spoken by the staff is violence. As a fresh-faced idealist shaped by Martin Luther King's sermons about loving your oppressor and breaking down racial barriers with non-violence learns, 'violence is the only lever big enough to move the world.' Colson Whitehead modelled the fictional reformatory of his 2019 novel The Nickel Boys on Dozier School, a Florida institution that closed in 2011 after operating for more than a century despite repeated allegations of beatings, rape, forced labour and murder at the hands of staff. Dozens of boys are estimated to have died on campus grounds with three times as many black victims as white. As of 2019, 82 unmarked graves had been found. The anonymity of the black youth who suffered endless abuse at Dozier led Whitehead to imagine their untold stories in The Nickel Boys, a Pulitzer Prize-winning book about a life-changing friendship between two boys, Elwood and Turner, hoping to survive a school of horrors. Whitehead presents the sickening reality of everyday life in Nickel with a thoughtful restraint. Not one to lay it on thick, he is forensic with his prose whether describing a young Elwood playing games with the kitchen staff at the hotel where his nana works, his after-school job at a convenience store or the systemic cruelties at Nickel. Maintaining a plainspoken tone throughout lends a devastating weight to the story as it progresses. While walking to college for his first day of classes, Elwood unknowingly hitchhikes with a man driving a stolen car and gets sentenced to Nickel. At first glance, Nickel looks innocuous with its manicured green lawns and red-brick buildings, like the college he almost went to or any other. The grisly truth reveals itself once he is directed to the black side of the campus. Just as Whitehead keeps the violence largely off page in the novel, RaMell Ross keeps it off frame in his blistering film adaptation. It is hidden away in the edges and shadows of subjectivity. Cries of students savagely beaten at night are masked by the drones of an industrial fan. When Elwood (Ethan Herisse) sees a young boy being harassed by two bullies in the dormitory bathroom, he intervenes — a gesture that earns all four a visit to the torture chamber. There, each student is flogged with a leather strap by the white superintendent Spencer (Hamish Linklater). The camera, standing in for the darting eyes of a nervous Elwood waiting for his turn, glances at a Bible on a nearby table and his restless legs. Ross doesn't show the flogging. Instead, he cuts to fuzzy stills of Dozier boys from the archives. The distorted images of real lives folded into fiction serve to challenge the sanitising of history while condemning the violence of erasure. Where the book is written in the third person, the film is shot almost entirely from a first-person vantage. We are thrust into the film with the camera aligned with the subjective perspectives of Elwood and Turner. We are invited to inhabit their perspectives, see what they see, hear what they hear, fear what they fear, and experience the terror of their everyday life and the poetry of their resilience. It is a formal choice purposed to untether blackness from an essentialised mode of looking, to reclaim black stories from white imaginations. And it shifts the very nature of how we engage with the film, from passive spectators to active witnesses. The stakes feel immediate and enveloping as we are kept rooted in a limited subjectivity and refused the respite of blinking at the horrors. Images of violence against black bodies have been historically refracted through the depersonalising, voyeuristic lenses of white image-makers. In reimagining Whitehead's novel, Ross takes Toni Morrison's advice: 'Take away the gaze of the white male. Once you take that out, the whole world opens up.' Abandoned by his parents, Elwood grew up with his nana Hattie (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) in segregated Tallahassee. He is a diligent student, loves reading encyclopaedias and plans to go to college. When he gets a Dr King record for Christmas, it awakens a strong belief in justice and civil rights. In the film, a young Elwood is introduced to Dr King when he sees the 'How Long, Not Long' speech on a TV through a store display window – where we also catch a teasing glimpse of Elwood in the reflection. Our first view of him in the full comes when he meets Turner (Brandon Wilson) at the cafeteria table in Nickel. The point of view switches from Elwood's to Turner's with the same scene playing from both their perspectives to contrast their dispositions. Turner is the sceptical pragmatist to Elwood's naive idealist. The key to surviving Nickel is no different to surviving outside, Turner tells Elwood. 'You gotta watch how people act. What they do. And then try to figure out how to get around them, like an obstacle course.' Navigating the obstacle course together puts Turner's honed every-man-for-himself instincts to the test. When Elwood is recovering from his beatings in the infirmary, Turner eats soap powder to make himself sick and join him. Riding out the sentence is easier said than done when at the mercy of a sadist like Spencer. But the pair's bond grants them the courage to dream of an escape out of Nickel. The film centres Elwood and Turner's shared destiny without forgoing any aspects of the brutal conditions that birth their alliance. That separate is inherently unequal is evidenced by the frayed clothes black students are given, the unpaid jobs they are coerced into and the brutality they are subjected to. When a black boy misunderstands the staff's instructions to tank a rigged game against a white opponent, he is beaten to death for insubordination. Abuse is so normalised it is spoken of in euphemisms. The torture chamber is nicknamed 'the white house' by the black boys and 'the ice cream factory' by the white boys limping out with multi-coloured bruises. 'A date on Lovers' Lane' suggests rape. 'Community service' refers to a door-to-door facility provided to local businessmen who pay Nickel a tidy sum for the supplies meant for black students. This vile enterprise is made doubly so by the fact that Turner and Elwood are enlisted to help the white student Harper (Fred Hechinger) on his delivery assignments in town. Leaving school grounds allows the two to taste the brief but sweet joy of freedom. But the potential consequences if the two, as opposed to Harper, were to give in to the temptation to escape underlines the power asymmetry of segregation. The doctrine of separate but equal is further complicated at Nickel by Jamie, a student of Mexican descent who keeps getting tossed back and forth between the black and white sides of the school because the staff can't seem to agree on where he belongs. When Elwood and Turner converse, the boomeranging POVs resemble a shot/reverse shot. The fluidity of the camerawork ensures we are never taken out of the story. The camera becoming the eyes of Elwood and Turner doesn't mean it moves and blinks like the human eye. Instead of an accurate simulation of 20/20 vision, Ross opts for a more lyrical approximation that stays true to the story's emotional scope. The leads performing with a camera rigged to their bodies or performing with a camera as scene partner doesn't rob the film of its gravity. It simply puts the emphasis on the power of perspective over the strength of performance. If the novel opens with an exhumation of bodies in the present, the film opens with an evocation of memories from the past: oranges dangle from a tree in the warm breeze of sunny Florida; below a hand strokes the grass in a yard; a gentle voice beckons a young Elwood to come inside. Light, sensory details and impressionist touches give vivid shape to memories, be it condensation on a beer can from the time Elwood's parents played cards with friends or nana icing a cake. Ross adds his own poetic flourishes to enrich his POV conceit: pencils drop from the ceiling in a magical moment when a Dr King speech is played in class; sparks from a pick-up truck dragging a crucifix along the road and cameos from stray alligators heighten the hellish nightmare of Nickel. The first-person perspective flips to third when the film flashes forward from the events at Nickel to an adult Elwood (Daveed Diggs) living with his girlfriend, running a moving company and growing old in New York. It's as if he had to become a whole different person to survive. The camera stays over the shoulder of a man who has dissociated to keep the past in the past but remains haunted by the spectre of trauma. Limiting the POV to the third person allowed Whitehead to withhold the big reveal at the end. Oscillating between dual perspectives and between the past and present doesn't soften the weight of the reveal in the film. But the reveal itself shouldn't surprise alert viewers. As for the truth about Nickel, it doesn't come out until the 2010s when unmarked graves are discovered on the site where the reformatory once stood and now an office park is to be built by a real estate developer. A shocking atrocity is but a cause of annoyance for the developer. Like Whitehead's The Underground Railroad, Nickel Boys is a saga about escaping Deep South captivity, informed by real-life atrocities American history would rather sweep under the rug. That Elwood and Turner come up against horrors Cora and Cesar were subjected to a century before attests to how little had changed. The ghosts of the injustices that transpired feel present to this day: in police harassment, disproportionate incarceration, hyper-surveillance and all the promising futures derailed by a system focused on social control and maintaining the power hierarchy within the US. Reformatories were established with the belief that young offenders were deserving of mercy away from hardened adult criminals. But it was neither mercy nor a foundation for adulthood that these schools offered. Prahlad Srihari is a film and pop culture writer. He lives in Bangalore.
The Independent
02-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Independent
Nickel Boys' Brandon Wilson: ‘There's no logic to racial structures'
How would you react if a film you starred in was unexpectedly nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars? By popping a bottle of champagne, jumping up and down, or bragging on social media, maybe. But Brandon Wilson, who leads RaMell Ross' adaptation of Colson Whitehead's Pulitzer Prize -winning novel Nickel Boys alongside Ethan Herisse, did none of these things when the drama got the nod alongside titles including Anora, The Brutalist, Conclave, The Substance and Wicked last month. 'I was excited,' the 31-year-old actor promises ahead of the awards show this Sunday. '[But] it's funny. It's like that expression: 'Once you've seen how the sausage is made'. I don't care about the sausage anymore.' While awards may be frivolous, Nickel Boys is nevertheless remarkable. Wilson plays Turner, a teenager with an abundance of effortless charm despite living in the hellish reform school Nickel Academy. It's here – where children are routinely beaten and abused – that he befriends his bookish classmate Elwood (Herisse) who's unfairly incarcerated after unknowingly hitching a ride in a stolen Chevy convertible. Turner, a long-term resident, shows Elwood how to make their cruel reality marginally more bearable with afternoons spent listening to music or swimming in the pool at a local woman's house where they've been sent to paint her porch. While Elwood quietly collects evidence against the racist institution to take the organisation down and set himself free, Turner is more resigned to his fate. 'He works within his box,' Wilson says. 'He believes in the reality of his cage. But he's smart enough to furnish it to his likings.' We chat over Zoom in late January while relentless wildfires continue to rip through Los Angeles, leaving the ruins of burned homes and palm trees in their wake. Wilson sits on the floor of his bedroom in nearby Burbank, 15 miles from the worst of the destruction. 'The smoke was surrounding us but we were clear of the fire's direct path,' he explains, sipping on tea, eyes still sleepy for the 9am call. Despite flames still burning across the county, the actor notes how alarmingly fast Hollywood normality has resumed. 'Everything's on fire and it's these moments that reveal the fragility of [life],' he says. 'And you're like, 'well, all right, I guess we're just gonna keep going'… I don't want to talk flippantly about it.' Wilson was born in Atlanta, Georgia, moving to California with his mum and brother at the age of nine – after his father died. With showbiz ambition that Wilson admits is a mystery to him now, he told his mother he wanted to become an actor when he was just six years old. 'It is young, and it's strange,' he reflects. Still, his mum enrolled him in the John Robert Powers talent academy programme and Wilson quickly began to land small roles in low budget films. Notably, the western Set Apart alongside Richard Roundtree in 2009, the football biographical drama Pelé: Birth of a Legend in 2016 and sports drama The Way Back with Ben Affleck in 2020. 'I was mostly just a basketball player in that one,' says Wilson, who concedes acting alongside the Argo star was 'cool' but 'he's just a person'. It's when talking about the making of Nickel Boys that Wilson, softly spoken, unshakably relaxed, appears truly proud. Set in the 1960s South and based on the story of the now-closed Dozier School for Boys in Marianna, Florida, where dozens of unmarked graves were uncovered on the property in the last decade, the film serves as a legacy for those who lost their lives at the institution. 'It makes you more connected to those people who could just remain stories or statistics,' Wilson says. '[Ross] wanted to show that everyone back then felt the same range of emotions we do today. To give them a full life.' Shot over two and a half months in Louisiana, Nickel Boys is executed from the first person perspective; meaning every horrifying plot development is witnessed through Turner or Elwood's eyes. Because we're a country of David Mitchell and Robert Webb addicts, this technique has been often somewhat inappropriately likened to the much-loved Channel 4 POV comedy Peep Show. 'I watched an episode!' says Wilson when I apologetically ask about the comparison. 'My manager is from the UK and when he heard about Nickel Boys, he immediately said 'It's Peep Show '. I do like that humour sometimes,' he admits. 'I think Turner uses humour as a survival tactic.' Like Mitchell and Webb, Wilson and Herisse were often acting straight into the camera, standing nearby the operator, or had equipment rigged up to their chest to create the perspective effect. 'You don't get to look into someone's eyes,' Wilson reflects of the acting challenge. 'But there's still life in the camera lens. You can still feel the person's presence…I knew it was gonna be beautiful.' Nickel Boys looks gorgeous, yes, but the content is hard to stomach. Boys, who still delight in catching lizards, playing with army figures and eating ice cream, have been snatched from their families and are routinely beaten. The film's whipping scenes are somehow all the more harrowing for happening off screen. We hear the violence in brutal detail and see the scars on the boys in the shower. 'The third time I watched [the film] that part hit me harder,' Wilson says, apologising for the pun. 'The reality of what some of those boys had gone through… I think the way that [violence] is shown is still so effective.' When Elwood remarks on the horrors of Nickel Academy, Turner tells him that at least it's more honest than the faux civility happening between white and black people in free society. 'Out there, in here, it's the same,' he says. 'It's just in here, nobody has to act fake anymore.' Wilson empathises with this perspective. 'It's even more ludicrous to be in a place like that and pretend that everything makes sense. Like there's some sort of logic to these racial structures. To hide your emotions,' he says. 'It takes so much energy to conceal the things you're feeling on the inside… So, I definitely resonated with that.' Wilson notes there was much-needed empathy on set when he and Herisse were winding down from filming the most harrowing scenes. 'It was heavy,' he says, revealing he suffered migraines during the shoot. 'But there was a lot of trust, a lot of emotional awareness on that set that didn't feel common. People could see that I needed some space and it didn't feel judgemental.' Additionally, the star never felt uneasy around his fellow cast members, Hamish Linklater and Fred Hechinger, despite the fact they played a corrupt superintendent and school employee who oversee Nickel's deplorable convict labour scheme. 'They're very powerful and moving actors,' says Wilson.' So, you definitely feel it [but] there's still a part of my brain that knows we're playing. It never became like, 'that was too good, you're probably really racist.' There was no discomfort that lingered afterwards.' In terms of what's next, Wilson desperately wants to act again – in any capacity. 'We've been doing press for Nickel Boys for the past four months,' he says. 'Makes one feel insane. You're speaking to people for four minutes, everyone's asking the same questions, and you don't get to have a conversation with a real person because you're just selling the film,' he explains. 'It feels crazy. I've never gotten delirious so fast. So, yeah, I want to go and play again. I like to write scripts… maybe go and direct if all the movements happen organically. Yeah, that seems OK,' Wilson adds, self-effacing to the last.
USA Today
24-02-2025
- Entertainment
- USA Today
Q&A: Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor speaks on Oscar-nominated film 'Nickel Boys' and why it matters
In the Oscar-nominated film "Nickel Boys," the warm embrace from Hattie (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) radiates from the screen, pulling the viewer deeper into the heart-wrenching story. Hattie is the grandmother of Elwood (Ethan Herisse), a Black teen who gets sent to a juvenile reform school in the 1960s Jim Crow era just before he starts college. There, he builds a friendship with Turner (Brandon Wilson) as they both navigate the dark, segregated underbelly of Nickel Academy, where abuse and corruption runs rampant. Throughout the film, Hattie works incessantly to reunite and seek justice for her grandson. "Hattie saw Elwood as her hope," Ellis-Taylor explained. Notably, shot from a first-person point of view, the film was directed by RaMell Ross and was based on Colson Whitehead's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. It's inspired by the harrowing true story of the now-shut down Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys in Marianna, Florida. The institution was at the center of atrocious allegations of racism, deaths, beatings, and poor conditions. It was closed in 2011, and dozens of unmarked graves were found on the grounds. Last year, Florida officials awarded millions to an estimated 400 survivors for the abuse that occurred between 1940 and 1975 at Dozier and a second overflow reform facility. 'Nickel Boys' is nominated for best picture and best adapted screenplay. USA TODAY interviewed veteran actress Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, who has played in movies like "Ray," "If Beale Street Could Talk," and "King Richard," which earned her an Oscar nomination for best supporting actress in 2021. Rate your 'Film of the Year': Join our Movie Meter panel and make your voice heard! She spoke about her role as Hattie and the film's timeliness. (Note: This interview was edited for clarity and length and contains minor details about the movie.) The Oscars:What movie won best picture last year? Q&A with Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor of 'Nickel Boys' Q: I'm curious to know if you knew the true story before you got the script and, if not, what your reaction was during your research. Aunjanue: I would say I had superficial knowledge about what had happened at the Dozier school. I didn't have a full understanding of it. I knew that what had happened - at least with the bits and pieces that I had heard about - was barbaric and yet unsurprising. But I didn't become fully educated about it until I started to work on the film. Q: What helped you prepare for your role as Hattie? Where did you draw inspiration from, and how do you feel you maintained her sense of warmth in such a tragic story? Aunjanue: I think one of the things that I was conscious about and intentional about was that I wanted her to be warm. I wanted to show what it is like for a grandmother to love her grandson. I tried to express that in my smiles. I wanted that adoration to shine as much as possible, just because we see it so rarely. And I know how much I adore my niece and nephew. They make me smile far more than they make me scowl so I wanted to show that because that was real to me. Q: Can you tell me how you think the film adequately shows the grandson-grandparent dynamic, especially in Black families, and how the film depicts that truthfully? Aunjanue: Hattie saw Elwood as her hope. She was nervous for him, nervous for the activism work that he was beginning to do. She was nervous for his life, but in many ways, relented because she knew that Elwood was among thousands of Elwoods during that time, and they were the hope, not just for her, but the hope of and for the Black community and communities at risk in a racist and casteist society. Q: In the scene when Hattie first meets Turner, she doesn't know him from anywhere. She just sees him at Nickel Academy, but she still embraces him. What do you think that scene reveals about Hattie, just as a character? Aunjanue: I think Hattie and Turner have something in common, and that is loneliness. That's isolation. It's this exile that they both feel. I think Hattie is a lot like all our Black grandmas and Black mamas. They have an emotional intelligence in that way. They're very sentient in a way that they can look at you and know something ain't right. She looks at this boy and the idea that he doesn't have somebody to hug him and thinks that is a crime. And thinks that's a travesty, and it's like, "No, not in my presence, not today. Somebody's going to love you today." Q: Why is the scene when Hattie finally hugs Elwood at the school so effective for viewers? Aunjanue: I think that it depends on how the viewer meets the film. If you're me, and you see this, you're thinking about the idea of not being able to reach or touch someone you care about, someone you love, especially when you know that the thing holding them and keeping them away from you is unjust. You know the frustration of that, the pain of that, the inevitable depression, the scars that it puts not only on your psyche but on your body. We don't talk about the physical effect of white supremacy on Black life and how it affects your body. Some of the work that I did in Mississippi regarding the Confederate flag there, I remember days when I could not get out of bed because I was so depressed and so angry and felt so helpless. That affected my sleep pattern. Folks who don't care about stuff like that ain't losing sleep, you know what I mean. It affects your health. So imagine being a grandmother, and you're not just dealing with the tools of white supremacy, but white supremacy taking something specific and human - your grandson away from you. What does that do to her body? Let alone her mind and soul, you know? So if you come into it with that coursing through your blood, I know you watch that and feel reflected. Q: How challenging was it to film that scene from a first-person point of view? I know you previously spoke about speaking to a camera instead of a person, so how was that experience for you in general? Aunjanue: Weird, you know? Listen. I knew that whatever I was going to do with my genius director, RaMell Ross, was going to be something that I had never experienced before, and that's why I wanted to do it. I knew that I was going to have to make, as my co-worker Ethan Herisse says, the camera a scene partner and, ultimately, the viewer a scene partner. And I don't like cameras. I hate them. I despise them. Sorry! I've never felt comfortable with them. They've always felt intrusive. It always makes me feel like what I'm doing is fake. So imagine having to take that thing you have talked about, which has been an enemy all your life, and make it your friend and have a relationship with it. It was strange. It was hard. It was never, not tough, but you know what Hattie was going through at the time was never not tough, so I think it fed the work. Q: Why do you think now, in 2025, is the right time to tell this story? Aunjanue: It is past the time for everybody to know what happened to those children at that school. First of all, it shouldn't have happened in the first place. There were folks in that community. They knew what was happening to those kids, and they did not say anything. What does it say about this country that we allow that kind of barbarism to happen on our soil and don't say anything, don't do anything about it? I mean, slavery happened here, and it took hundreds of years for that to end because, somehow, it was okay to do that to people. What does that say about our humanity? It was always the right time to tell this story because it should have never happened. Q: How do you think this film will impact directors who want to tell similar stories of injustice in the future? Aunjanue: What RaMell is doing, I think, cannot be overstated. What he has said about 'Nickel Boys' and the way that he shot it, is it's not enough to tell the story. I can answer your question by saying, Yeah, we need to tell more stories, right? But that's not enough. It's not enough to tell more stories. You also have to examine the tools with which we do the storytelling, and that is what he has done. What he is saying is it's not just about the dearth of storytelling about Black life and injustice and so on. It is the camera itself that needs to be confronted and how the camera itself has been complicit in creating these images that have been complicit in how we have been demoralized and harmed by this economy that is built on white hatred. Q: What was your reaction to the film's nominations for best picture and best adapted screenplay? Aunjanue: We had to get people to understand that what RaMell is doing is something that is this sort of necessary revolution and a way to honor these children and what happened to them in a way that is singular and rare. So I swear to you, it is all I wanted, and for it to happen, I'm just overjoyed. Taylor Ardrey is a news reporter for USA TODAY. You can reach her at tardrey@
The Guardian
18-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘History was attempted to be buried': the true story behind Oscar-nominated Nickel Boys
It was one of the darkest, most shameful episodes in Florida's grotesque history of state-sanctioned racism: dozens of children, most of them Black, beaten or shot to death, or sexually abused in a decades-long reign of terror at a secretive and remote reform school. Early next month at the Academy Awards in Los Angeles, the horrors that befell the students of the notorious Arthur G Dozier School for Boys will be laid bare before the world, courtesy of a best picture nomination for the 'transcendentally moving and frightening film' Nickel Boys, and a best adapted screenplay nod for director RaMell Ross and his co-writer, Joslyn Barnes. The two Black teenagers who are the movie's main protagonists, and the institution they were sent to, are fictional. But the era of Jim Crow segregation laws and white supremacy in which the movie is set was all too painfully real. The adaptation of Colson Whitehead's Pulitzer Prize-winning 2019 novel reveals stark truths about the ordeal the Dozier boys endured, including the abuse and violence inflicted upon them by staff and guards, and how white officials hid the truth for years. 'Quite literally, the boys were buried, and the history was attempted to be buried,' Ross said. 'Now [the Dozier story] is elevated to academic history, to literature history, to like the annals of cinema.' Ross's Nickel Academy is less of a film-maker's visualization of a brutal 1960s deep south, state-run youth rehabilitation facility than an unvarnished replica of Dozier, formally known as the Florida Reform School for Boys from its opening in the tiny panhandle town of Marianna in 1900 to its eventual closure in 2011. In the grounds, a lime-washed building known as the White House was where children as young as six were taken after minor transgressions and chained to tables as they were flogged into unconsciousness. There were allegations by survivors, many of them now deceased, of a 'rape dungeon'; others recalled relentless thrashings with the metal buckle of a leather belt known as 'black beauty'; in real life as well as in the book and movie, some children would disappear in the middle of the night, never to be seen alive again. The bodies of those who did not return joined others uncovered during a three-year dig that began in 2013 by anthropologists from the University of South Florida (USF), whose work provided the inspiration for Whitehead's book and ultimately Ross's historical drama. The USF team was led by Dr Erin Kimmerle, who uncovered human remains in 55 graves. Some were buried within a makeshift cemetery known as Boot Hill, depicted in bleak realism in the movie with crude metal crosses as markers. Others were found elsewhere, several with gunshot wounds or blunt force trauma, or showing 'substantial evidence' of malnutrition or infections. Eight, including two teachers, died in a mysterious dormitory fire in 1914; 11 more fell victim to influenza four years later. Poorly maintained and incomplete state records showed 31 burials between 1914 and 1973, but the USF investigation placed the figure at a minimum of 98 deaths. Not all the bodies were recovered, and in 2019 another 27 'possible' gravesites were discovered. Painstaking research and DNA testing allowed Kimmerle, who acted as an anthropological consultant for Nickel Boys, to positively identify a handful of the victims and bring what she called 'a type of justice' to the families of those who died. One was George Owen Smith who, like one of the main characters in Nickel Boys, was sent to reform school when he was found riding in a stolen car. He was 14 when he disappeared in 1940, and school officials wrote his parents that he had run away and was later found dead from pneumonia. But a witness saw staff taking him to the White House and carrying him out again motionless. Smith's sister, Ovell Krell, told the Guardian in 2014 that his identification and return of his body was 'the end of a long, hard journey'. Kimmerle said she appreciated the accuracy of Nickel Boys in dramatizing many of her team's revelations. She pointed to the clear depiction of a pre-civil rights era in which young Black men and children could be sent to harsh institutions such as Dozier for smoking, truancy, being considered 'incorrigible', or simply having no other place to go. 'There's so many stories, so much death and abuse, and just the injustice of why they were there, and who was there, and all of it,' she said. 'All these boys who died, it was one example after another of injustices before civil rights, like why do these children not have lawyers, why are they arrested without their parents notified, why are they just deemed incorrigible and sent to a labor camp for two years? 'It can be so heavy, and hard to talk about, and when I've spoken about the research or the history, sometimes I feel like I'm leaving the audience so down and depressed. But it's also the story about finding peace and hope for those families, so I really appreciated the [movie's] approach.' Ross said he hoped the Dozier story, and his Oscar-nominated retelling of it, would be seen as a poignant 'movie of the moment'. Donald Trump's administration is attacking diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs; and in Florida, despite an official apology for the Dozier abuses in 2017 and opening of a $20m compensation fund for victims, hard-right governor Ron DeSantis is accused of being 'actively hostile' to the Black community. 'It's made me think about the way in which history is being erased contemporaneously [and] the way in which history can be like a sort of experiential monument,' Ross said. 'The thing about making work about quote unquote justice, and I like to see this film as a sort of visual justice, is that it's always the right time, it just becomes more the right time, because these things seem to never end. 'Hopefully I'm wrong, but I'm sure that it'll be a movie of the moment in 10 years because of the way that things are going and the way things have gone.'
Yahoo
16-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
'Nickel Boys': How filmmaker RaMell Ross crafted visionary Oscar-nominated movie
With one of the most affecting and impactful movies released in recent years, RaMell Ross has established himself as a visionary filmmaker with Nickel Boys (now in theatres, available on VOD in the U.S.). Based on the novel by Colson Whitehead, the film has been celebrated as a masterpiece since its premiere. "It's been rewarding, as that's the aim, and someone being kind of speechless after or not being able to gather their thoughts I think means the intention of having the film be something that feels more ... experiential, it did at least part of its thing," Ross told Yahoo Canada about seeing the response to the film. "Then it's fun to kind of like prod people and ask them to try, and then the fumbling is kind of interesting, because those first initial words are pretty telling." Nickel Boys is a story told through the perspective of two Black teenage boys Elwood, played by Ethan Herisse, and Turner, played by Brandon Wilson, set in the Jim Crow South. The boys establish a friendship when they're both sent to a reform school in Florida, the Nickel Academy, based on the real-life Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys that closed in 2011. There are still ongoing investigations into more than 100 deaths that happened on the ground at Arthur G. Dozier, many buried in unmarked graves. Elwood has a more optimistic view, clinging to his dream of going to college, while Turner's focus is on trying to survive the nightmare of the Nickel Academy, dispensing the necessary information to Elwood. The journey of watching Nickel Boys is incredibly unique, with Ross beginning the film from the perspective of Elwood, with the camera then shifting between Elwood and Turner's points of view. As Ross has described, the filmmaker sees the camera as an organ so that the audience feels like they're both Elwood and Turner through the story. It's something Ross identified that he's been working on since he made his previous film, the brilliant Hale County This Morning, This Evening. "I think the reason why the book ['Nickel Boys'] could be approached with what some people would call boldness, but what I would call just a type of cogency ... or lucidity is because it's just kind of at the end of an art practice, that's the next kind of step of it," Ross said. "And so having two characters who resembled myself, essentially the two characters that are in Hale County This Morning, This Evening, it's quite natural for me to wonder what they saw, and not seeing them see things, but from inside their heads." With that perspective also comes unique embodiment of the characters by the actors in Nickel Boys. For example, Daveed Diggs, who plays adult Elwood, what we see from him is a portrayal of the character through the movement of his back and shoulders, not seeing his face. "I feel very fortunate that the actors were just so deeply talented that they could take on that," Ross said. "And it wasn't just voice and eye contact, ... they had to act with their hands and as Daveed, act with his shoulders, act with his ears and his angles." "It's interesting because while you can give direction and you can give instruction, you can't persuade or or produce embodiment. ... So whatever that those guys did, it's them, and as a director, as anyone that's there, it's ... a joy to watch people embody something." With this "camera as an organ" way of shooting the film, that also expended to the approach Ross took to not show and sit in the brutality of what the characters in Nickel Boys experience, but rather provide a sensory experience of the impact of trauma, staying true to each person's experience in that moment. "The approach, one, comes from feeling like people of colour have been over indexed with those images. The images of people of colour, they're bountiful in terms of that image," Ross explained. "And then ... culture at large is over indexed with the encounter of those images." "I think immediately, when you question that, and you think about any other method, you realize that there are way more methods to do it otherwise than there are to do it that way. ... What's erased or not explored as thoroughly or viscerally is its effects across time, its ripple effects. I think, maybe even most importantly, literally, if you make the camera an organ and you shoot from the inside of someone, no one's actually seen that happen to them. Very rarely if someone's going through trauma are they looking at the site of the injury while it's occurring. They're either fighting or they're fleeing or they're trying to cope. And with that you realize, again, that what cinema has done, it's producing these images that don't exist typically otherwise." While the vision Ross had for Nickel Boys is incredibly profound, the execution of this vision, in collaboration with cinematographer Jomo Fray, is particularly moving to watch, both from its technical standpoint and emotional feel. "I kind of came in with a really, really strong idea and knowing how I wanted to shoot it, ... and with conversations with [Jomo Fray] we were able to develop it," Ross said. "He basically invented a couple rigs and systems to execute some of the movement with a 6K camera. I didn't think it was really possible to get the fidelity, or to get the density of that image in some of the places we wanted." "He relates to the image really emotionally. I would say one of his deep strength, aside from the technical, is his emotional connection to light, and so he could build the scenes out with the type of touch needed." But while many films try to get to the action and most dramatic moments of their story, Nickel Boys allows the audience to experience its quieter moments. It's those elements that are often rushed through in many films that makes Ross's work feel even more powerful. "When you think about yourself and in most moments of your life, if you trace back every single instance, in between the longer sort of milestones or tentpoles of the day, I feel like most of it is looking around, and like staring at something, or daydreaming, or being slightly aloof with the anxiety of the future in the moment," Ross said. "There is something about the universal experience of perception, and seeing and feeling, that doesn't lend itself to commercial cinema, because of its need to keep someone engaged in a very specific way, and to not lose their attention, and make sure they're satisfied. But I think for a story like this, those in-between moments are more important, because we know the other parts of the story very, very, very, well, and in fact, they're normally filed into a very specific emotional space that I think no longer has that actionable quality it used to have in the '60s, '70s and '80s."
