RaMell Ross & Joslyn Barnes of the Oscar-Nominated Doc HALE COUNTY THIS MORNING, THIS EVENING in Conversation

Tabitha Jackson assumed the role of Sundance Film Festival Director in February of 2020. Serving as the Director of the Documentary Film Program at Sundance Institute since 2013, she and her team encouraged the diverse exchange of ideas by artists with a mission to champion the power of artful cinema in the culture and to support a more expansive set of makers and forms. In 2019 she launched and led a new pillar of work at the Institute – Impact, Engagement and Advocacy – with the goal of reasserting the role of the independent artist as a dynamic force for social good.

Prior to joining Sundance she served as Head of Arts and Performance at Channel 4 Television in London, where she supported the independent and alternative voice and sought to find fresh and innovative ways of storytelling, including executive producing Mark Cousins’ cinematic odyssey The Story of Film. She is an award-winning Commissioning Editor, director, producer and writer who believes passionately in the arts as a public good.

Joslyn Barnes is a writer and producer. Among the films that she has been involved with producing since co-founding Louverture Films are the features: Bamako (Abderrahmane Sissako), The Time that Remains (Elia Suleiman), Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives and Cemetery of Splendour (Apichatpong Weerasethakul), White Sun (Deepak Rauniyar), Zama (Lucrecia Martel) and Capernaum (Nadine Labaki). 

Among the documentaries are: Trouble the Water (Lessin & Deal), Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975 (Göran Olsson), The House I Live In (Eugene Jarecki), Strong Island (Yance Ford), and Hale County This Morning,This Evening (RaMell Ross). 

Forthcoming documentaries include Angels Are Made of Light by James Longley and Aquarela by Victor Kossakovsky. 

In 2017, Barnes was the recipient of the Sundance Institute | Amazon Studios Producer Award. In 2018, she won the Emmy Award for Exceptional Merit in Documentary Filmmaking, and in both 2018 and 2019 earned Oscar Nominations for Best Documentary Feature.

RaMell Ross is a filmmaker, photographer and writer. His photographs have been exhibited around the world and in the US most recently at a solo exhibition at Aperture Foundation in New York and in the landmark exhibition New Southern Photography at the Ogden Museum in New Orleans. 

His writing has appeared in such outlets as The New York Times, Film Quarterly and the Walker Arts Center. 

In 2015, he was selected as one of Filmmaker Magazine's "25 New Faces of Independent Film" and as a New Frontier Artist in Residence at the MIT Media Lab. In 2016, he was a finalist for the Aperture Portfolio Prize, winner of an Aaron Siskind Individual Photographer's Fellowship and a Sundance Art of Nonfiction Fellow. In 2017, he was selected for Rhode Island Foundation's Robert and Margaret Maccoll Johnson Artist Fellowship. 

RaMell's debut feature documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening won a Special Jury Prize for Creative Vision at its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in 2018 and has since gone on to secure international theatrical, broadcast and streaming distribution as well as garnering multiple awards at top tier film festivals. The film was nominated for two IDA awards and five Cinema Eye Honors. The film won the Gotham Award for Best Documentary and the Cinema Eye Honor for Outstanding Achievement in Nonfiction Feature Filmmaking and is now nominated for the ICS, Independent Spirit Award, DGA Documentary Award and Oscar® for Best Documentary.

RaMell is currently on faculty at Brown University's Visual Arts Department and recently completed his first short film, Easter Snap, which premiered at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival.