In his autobiography, Chronicles: Volume One, Bob Dylan reflects upon the haunting spiritual state of New Orleans, and offers the opinion that, “The past doesn't pass away so quickly here. You could be dead for a long time.” Though he is describing New Orleans, his words can be applied more broadly across the entire South. Dylan’s words set the context for Lance Hammer’s debut film, Ballast, which is set in the Mississippi Delta. The film focuses on three characters trapped in the wintery wasteland of the Mississippi Delta: Lawrence (Micheal J. Smith Sr.), his late-brother’s ex-wife Marlee (Tarra Riggs) and her son James (JimMyron Ross).

Lawrence’s brother commits suicide, which spurs Lawrence to sublimate his emotional pain with a bullet to the gut. Though his reaction to his brother’s death is so lacking in emotion that it borders on autistic, Lawrence’s actions betray the placid exterior. He heals physically; however, his minimalist body language demonstrates that the emotional wounds are still raw. The only sign of life is his breathing, as indicated by the cigarette smoke that routinely exits from his nostrils. The death lingers like the spirits of Dylan’s New Orleans.

His brother’s memory weighs on Lawrence’s broad shoulders, bringing the characteristically sluggish southern tempo to a prolonged crawl. The film’s pace embodies the somber transience of life in the Mississippi Delta—a region that sways in a lazy waltz with the ghosts of the past.

With no male role model, his mother always at work and no institutional structure, James’s anti-social tendencies come as no surprise. James drives his dirt bike through empty fields, over dirt roads and across the grey sky in a tracking shot that shows both the beauty and the decay of the wintery Mississippi Delta—a land that appears to have been built with the purpose of being destroyed. He arrives at the property that his father and uncle once shared, and as Lawrence opens the front door, James pulls out a gun and robs him for drug money. The image of James holding the outstretched gun creates an image taut with the potential for raw violence, a violence that is unachievable in the fantasy of the blockbuster. This tension can be directly attributed to Hammer’s skill as a director.

Though Ballast is Hammer’s debut as a writer/director/producer, this scene alone proves that he has the chops. He crafts characters with such painful authenticity that the threat of violence becomes much more than an image on a movie screen. The gun, which is out of place in the hands of a lost young boy, evokes physical vulnerability.

After his relationship with the local drug dealers turns sour, James and Marlee flee to the home of their deceased father and ex-husband; a house that is located only yards away from Lawrence’s. Though Marlee is hesitant to live in the house of the man that she has grown to hate, she and her son are out of options. After an initial rough patch, Marlee decides to remain at the house and take on the responsibility of running the store that Lawrence and his brother had previously run. The plot developments are obscured by the performances, which are evidence of Hammer’s conscious rejection of the Hollywood film. Rather than relying on plot, Hammer devotes the film’s attention to its characters.

He could easily have exploited the plot to create a cheap melodrama, but he avoids cliché by crafting a psychological study that would make William Faulkner proud. The reference is inevitable, as Hammer employs the premise of Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying: the death of an anonymous character sparks the tortured introspection of those who are unwillingly forced to remain in close quarters.

Cinematographer, Lol Crawley uses the camera to serve as another allusion to Faulkner. His use of a shallow depth of field emulates Faulkner’s narrative style in As I Lay Dying. All that Crawley allows is a bit of clarity among blurred images, which suggest the narrow perspectives of Faulkner’s varying narrators. Faulkner and the Southern Gothic haunt Lances Hammer’s Ballast.

Hammer ultimately succeeds in his courageous attempt to prove that real life is worthwhile. His efforts have been rewarded with the Directing Award and Cinematography Award from Sundance, as well as other festival nominations. Hammer crafts a subtle dance of few words, where body language conveys the subtle beauty that can be found among the rural decay and the humans that struggle to emerge from the wreckage.