The US photographer and director of Hale County This Morning, This Evening talks about how his latest film, Nickel Boys, redraws the contours of cinema

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.