This month, the 2019 Colson Whitehead novel “Nickel Boys” will have a film adaptation, masterfully directed by filmmaker, educator, and photographer RaMell Ross. The book version is an emotional read, but Ross’ lens takes audiences on a preternatural experience that will leave them changed by the end credits. The film emphasizes unnerving sound design to center just how powerless Black Americans felt in the Jim Crow South, specifically Florida. Archival footage is intercut between scenes, heightening the tension and merciless fear instilled in the boys attending the segregated reform school, Nickel Academy. Amid the horrors the students face, brotherhood and the will to survive are found between the protagonists, Elwood Curtis (Ethan Herisse) and Jack Turner (Brandon Wilson).

Ross, who previously directed the Oscar-nominated documentary “Hale County This Morning, This Evening” and the short film “Easter Snap,” grounds “Nickel Boys” in a balance of dreamscape and lifescape, also positioning memory and reality to affect viewers’ stimuli. But a thematic throughline in Ross’ works is Afrosurrealism, or a use of surreal visual techniques to explore the multidimensionality of Black existence.  

“I think of all concepts I've ever encountered, I think the one that's most mysterious is afrofuturism and afrosurrealism because I feel like that's the nature of being a Black person,” Ross tells BET.com. “It’s like the psychological gaps between what is reality and what are the ideas of truth and rationale and Enlightenment-era thinking and modernity and forced slavery and racism. Those things, they don't work, they don’t align, and that produces psychosis. It should produce surrealism, which is how the film is built.”

This is cinematically achieved in “Nickel Boys” by filming through the POV perspective of the main characters and by centering those focal to Elwood and Turner’s lives. The young men share the trauma of being abandoned, both physically and emotionally, by their parents—that relational bond further provides context for their isolated viewpoint.

“Talking to Aunjanue [Ellis-Taylor] within a lot of these interviews and the guys, it was initially very hard for them to not have a traditional scene partner, to [instead] have a camera as a scene partner and a camera operator as a team partner,” Ross explains. “That, Aunjanue said, produced an isolation in her that was really uncomfortable, which she then turned into a feeling that she could inhabit with Hattie, who’s isolated, someone who doesn’t have anything.”

While pondering their means of enduring Nickel Academy, Elwood and Turner still find ways of maintaining their kismet connection. Elwood, in particular, shows a fondness for comic books, literature, and his greatest influence, Dr. Martin Luther King. These allow him to see his personal greatness, albeit while encountering racial hardships.

“One thing about the film and the writing process that Joslyn Barnes and I executed, we were very interested in the idea of a genuine plurality of intention and a plurality of interpretation for each moment and each symbol and each idea, in order to have it be as conceptually rich as the way that our lives are,” Ross says. “You can be doing something and you have your narrative in your head, but that only means that to you–there's also another way to interpret it clearly.”

He continues, “With the comic books, that's what that does. It obviously connects with someone who is engaged with these fanciful entertainments and grand mythological narratives, but it also even more unconsciously ties into the relationship between fantasy, fiction and reality.”

But when Elwood nearly loses himself in his grand aspirations, reality often, and jarringly, sets in. “To me, that ties into the social constructs and ideas of Blackness being fact and fiction, and the way in which you are Elwood in the world and the space race and the moon [landing are happening], and Oh my God, I'm a young human. I cannot believe humanity is... And then some guy’s poking a cane in your stomach, because he thinks you stole something, because you're just a guy on the street,” Ross says.

“You're quite literally grounded when you are in contact with the moon footage and you're forced to fill the tension between the racialized nature of these times and the extreme technological advancements that are happening,” he continues.

“Nickel Boys” doesn’t just depend on its cast to pull viewers in. As aforementioned, Ross also depended on archival footage juxtaposed with original scenes to tether the film to a visceral feeling. One scene even exhibits the desolate faces of children who were subjected to inhumane treatment at the Dozier School for Boys, which the book The Nickel Boys is loosely based on.

“We're making a fiction film based on Colson’s book; we're trying to get to the emotional core of the events, take the viewer on a journey, but you’d be hard-pressed to find or be able to do anything that's more powerful than looking at a portrait of a seven-year-old kid who was taken from his home and then murdered,” Ross insists.

The Florida environment also produces a double consciousness effect, in which Black viewers may decipher the film’s symbolism on a different level than others. There are shots of a mule and the orange picking stem from the southern literary gothic tradition, as well as a predatory alligator that recurs to foreshadow danger.

“You're not allowed to think that alligator is just a metaphor because, in Florida, they walk around like that. So of course, you’re contested with the truth, but then, also, Black kids were used as alligator bait in the South. So then there's a historical element of symbolism, and then we also can use it as a metaphor for systemic violence, the blind reptilian nature of being in a system.”

Now that Ross has deservedly won Best Director at The Gothams and the New York Film Critics Circle Awards, respectively, he wants “Nickel Boys” to achieve what it’s partly set out to do: encourage Black men to recognize their trauma and choose to live in spite of it.

“I hope that, in some ways, it just invites them to think about the process,” Ross says. “To acknowledge that they are traumatized and not to believe in what culture has sort of produced in the Black man. That being strong and not crying and not expressing your emotions is how you deal with things or that’s somehow to the benefit of anyone.”

He continues, “It seems to me like Elwood and Turner finding each other and being open to love–quite literally love that is not romantic, but maybe overlaps with romantic love, but isn't physical romantic love–is a way out for every person.”