RaMell Ross’ first film, the Oscar-nominated “Hale County This Morning, This Evening,” was an unusual project for a director whose day job was as an artist and a teacher at Brown University in Rhode Island. “It was a small art project that converted into a doc,” said Ross, who wasn’t looking to make another movie, much less a narrative film, when “Hale County” was finished.
But Plan B producers Dede Gardner and Jeremy Kleiner came to him and his producer Joslyn Barnes about the Colson Whitehead novel “The Nickel Boys,” a harrowing story based on a real-life Florida reformatory that abused and even killed young Black teens for decades.