Artists don’t come much more outsider than RaMell Ross. He once mailed himself across the US in a wooden crate. He says things like: “What would happen if the camera was Buddhist?” and, until now, he has never made a feature film. Not the obvious candidate to entrust with adapting a Pulitzer-winning novel, you might think, yet Ross has managed to make a movie that is socially impassioned and highly awards-friendly – and so avant garde that it almost reinvents cinema.
In its subject matter alone, Nickel Boys is remarkable: adapted from Colson Whitehead’s novel, it follows two young Black boys at a segregated reform school in Florida in the 1960s. It is a story of friendship in the face of racism, injustice, abuse and even murder. The setting is based on the infamous real-life Arthur G Dozier School, where scores of unmarked graves of students were discovered in 2012.
