And now to our ongoing arts and culture series, Canvas.

It's not every day that a director's debut feature film earns an Academy Award nomination for Best Picture.

But that's exactly what happened for Ramel Ross and the movie Nickel Boys.

Senior arts correspondent Jeffrey Brown spoke with Ross about his distinctive style.

Elwood, look at me, son.

In the film, Nickel Boys, it is we who are asked to look.

He said what we have here is a classic miscarriage of justice.

Forced to look at the world through the eyes of two young black men,

living in an often brutal time and place in the Jim Crow South.

The camera perspective is from the point of view of the characters themselves,

not us looking at them.

Where'd you come from?

Director Ramelle Ross.

To do this means that you're

aligning the subjectivity of the audience with the subjectivity of the character, and that seems

to be an undeniable way to get into the truth. The film is based on the 2019 Pulitzer Prize

winning novel The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead,

who based his fiction on a grim reality, the real-life Dozier School for Boys,

a reform school run by the state of Florida from 1900 to 2011.

Finally closed after hundreds of black men came forward to tell of abuse, including floggings,

forced labor, even killings.

And forensic anthropologists uncovered human remains in unmarked graves.

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