Originally conceived as a meditation on the beauty of the American south, inspired by her love of William Faulkner and James Baldwin, this latest documentary by Chantal Akerman (Jeanne Dielman, Rendezvous d’Anna) was transformed by a racist crime that occurred only days before filming began in the summer of 1998: the notorious dragging-murder of James Byrd, Jr., a black man, in Jasper, Texas. Journeying from Virginia, down through Georgia, and across to Jasper, South investigates the Texas community and the brutal crime committed there with the same classically composed imagery that had so eloquently rendered the weight of history in her previous essay on Eastern Europe, D’Est. The film culminates with an exquisitely meditative tracking shot of the full three-mile length of road over which Byrd was dragged. The “long and convoluted” road Akerman herself took in creating this film was one she claimed “finally led me to understand that the film would again deal with something that continues to obsess me: history and anecdote, fear, mass graves, hatred of others, of oneself, but also the bedazzlement of beauty.”