A.V. Rockwell’s ‘A Thousand and One,’ Savanah Leaf’s ‘Earth Mama’ and now Raven Jackson’s ‘All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt’ are revelatory dramas that shape and shade more complex screen representations of Black mothers.

Do you see her? The Black mother wiping her son’s inner eye on a Harlem corner? It’s the late ’90s and she’s piecing her life back together after a prison stint. What about the mother positioning an infant for a photo? She works at a studio, tucked in a Bay Area mall, trying to make ends meet before the birth of her third child. Or the Black mother lounging in her living room during a party? Guests, drunk on liquor and a good time, buzz around her as a young girl plays at her feet. 

Look hard. We’ve seen these women before. Their stories are scribbled in the indie margins of Hollywood history: the Gullah women anchoring Julie Dash’s radical drama Daughters of the Dust; Roz (Lynn Whitfield) and Mozelle (Debbi Morgan) in Kasi Lemmons’ haunting Eve’s Bayou; and Dorothy (Barbara O. Jones) in Haile Gerima’s kinetic narrative Bush Mama are just a few of them. Following their forebears, Rockwell, Leaf and now Jackson have constructed distinctive cinematic styles that recast Black mothers as agents of their own lives instead of scapegoats of the state. 

The achievement of Rockwell’s film — winner of the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance in January — lies in Taylor’s performance. The actress finds depth in her character’s refusals and defensive postures. She mixes eye-rolls and steely stares with melodic laughs and heavy tears. Inez always gets her way and that gritty steadfastness — for better or worse — allows her to shape a life in spite of police violence, financial troubles and the rapid gentrification of her neighborhood. She yearns to be seen — by her friends, her partner (William Catlett), her son and, sometimes, by us. 

But Rockwell is protective. She supervises our curiosity through her adroit screenplay, which strategically discloses bits of Inez’s past to contextualize the character’s behavior. It’s all done with a light touch: Inez reveals personal history at random and slowly the young mother — who spent time in foster care herself, who masks her fragility with an iron exterior and who craves a home more than anything — comes into view. When Rockwell drops an eleventh-hour revelation, it complicates our perception of Inez, but it doesn’t negate our understanding of her interiority. 

The same sentiment applies to Gia (Tia Nomore), the protagonist of Leaf’s debut Earth Mama. Pregnant with her third child, Gia is fighting a system built to fail her. She struggles to balance the demands of a state-mandated program that will allow her to regain custody of her other two kids with her job assisting at a mall photo studio. Like Dorothy in Bush Mama, Gia repeatedly runs up against condescension when interacting with people employed to help her. 

Earth Mama is not all confession, though. Leaf, like Rockwell, plays with narrative withholding. A comment made by another mother in Gia’s class guides the film. “It’s my journey,” the woman says after an instructor asks her why people should care if she makes it. “You can hold my hand, you can look back from a distance, but you still won’t feel what I feel.” Gia is not opaque, but she’s not legible either. No matter how close the camera lingers on her face or her bulging belly, parts of her remain hidden. The surrealist moments — flashes of Gia meditating among towering redwoods, a branch growing from her navel — add to this air of mystery. 

If Rockwell and Leaf experiment with ambiguity, Jackson embraces it. All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt finds freedom in its own cinematic grammar — the kind of poetic reticence and circularity found in Daughters of the Dust. Mack (Kaylee Nicole Johnson as a girl; Charleen McClure as an adult) anchors the elliptical narrative about a young woman coming of age in Mississippi. The film opens at a whisper and rarely intensifies. We see a young Mack learning how to trap catfish from her father (Chris Chalk), his gentle voice warning her not to let them go. Jomo Fray’s camera basks in textures the same way the scenes are immersed in sounds, focusing on the child’s fingers caressing the fish scales or her hand running through the babbling creek. 

Jackson revels in the details of her protagonist’s life: Mack’s reluctance to scale a fish; the young girl watching her mother (Sheila Atim) get ready for a party; a fire that distresses the neighborhood; a gaggle of teens climbing trees and swimming to pass the summer days. These flashes eventually cohere into a story and a portrait of a young, resolute woman. They also respond to the final lines of Eve’s Bayou: “Memory is the selection of images,” an older Eve (voiced by Tamara Tunie) says at the end of that film. “Each image is like a thread, each thread woven together to make a tapestry of intricate texture, and the tapestry tells a story, and the story is our past.”