Quincy is a new father to an energetic toddler, and Daniel is a basketball player at Selma University. Ross rejects didactic documentary modes that spectate and collate the experiential aspects of being black, as he states , “however big and vast and multifaceted” that experience is. In this regard, Hale County is less about Quincy’s and Daniel’s life journey and more a meditative composite of the complexity of the individual and collective black southern experience.

Read: The uncomfortable and profound authenticity of ‘Roma’

The fact that Hale County received an Oscar nod is significant. In terms of documentaries about black subjects, over the past three decades, the Academy has nominated 28, including Richard Kilberg’s Adam Clayton Powell (1990), Spike Lee’s 4 Little Girls (1998), and Ava DuVernay’s 13th (2017). Of this group, just six documentaries (two of which were directed by black men) have won the coveted award. Half of these winning films (When We Were Kings (1997), Undefeated, O.J.) interrogate the fraught politics of black male athletes’ value, fetishization, and/or repudiation in the public imagination. While excellent works in their own right, most of the winners sensationalize the stereotypical binary of black people as either exceptional or deviant and, in some cases, both.

Hale County is interested in the realm of sports—principally through Daniel’s collegiate basketball career—but the film reframes how audiences image and imagine black athletes. For example, Ross films a brief scene where a player dunks during a game. Shot in slow motion from behind a seated Daniel, the scene shows him standing and cheering from the bench. With the sound distorted by the slow-motion effect, Daniel turns to look back at the camera, crying out “Oh, no!” before the image cuts to the inside of a car that has been pulled over by the police. Daniel, who is in the front seat, states: “Man, I don’t think if we were white he would have did all that.” Looking into the back seat directly into the camera at Ross, Daniel asks: “What you think?”

The camera then cuts to a close-up of the rearview mirror, revealing the white police officer who pulled them over. The image is layered with the sounds of Daniel’s distorted voice from back on the court, witnessing the slam dunk, and calling out: “Oh my God, whose child is this?!” As the audience ponders “what it thinks” about black men being treated differently than white people by the cops, Daniel’s exclaimed query enters the scene as both celebration and condemnation of the ways in which black people are spotlighted in American society.

Scenes like this show audiences that Hale County is not a “hoop dreams” story, a narrative fascinated with the prospect of ghetto escape, money beyond measure, and the meritocracy of sporting ability. Ross’s film is a cinematic portrait of black men living and loving, being and becoming, existing and resisting in the cultural realities and fantasies of the American South. It is also about repudiating Hollywood’s dominant representational regimes, which, as per the Academy’s history, is often limited to the black athlete or the black criminal.