ERF Shorts Lab Fellow

Justice Jamal Jones Conjures the South in "Crossroads Blues"

Justice Jamal Jones’s "Crossroads Blues" unfolds in an imagined South during Reconstruction. At its center is Belize, a child of Vodou who forms a charged relationship with a blues musician haunted by visions of the devil. The story is intimate yet heightened, drawing on myth, ritual, and music. It sits somewhere between historical dream and contemporary reckoning.

Jones’s filmmaking combines personal memory with the mythic. Their short How to Raise a Black Boy reimagined Black boyhood as a fairytale and screened at over 30 international festivals including Sundance. Notes on a Siren, a mixed-media work created in collaboration with Palm Heights in the Cayman Islands, took myth as its starting point but folded in choreography, ritual, and site-specific research. Featured by NOWNESS, it underscored Jones’s interest in cinema as an act of transformation.

That sense of transformation carries into Crossroads Blues. The film takes inspiration from the history of blues music, Vodou traditions, and the cultural anxieties of the Reconstruction era, while filtering them through a contemporary understanding. The result is at once theatrical and deeply felt, rooted in tactile detail — breath, sweat, the slide of fingers over a guitar string.

Alongside narrative work, Jones has directed campaigns for Converse, Calvin Klein, MTV, and ARRI, treating commercial projects with the same cinematic precision and poetic sensibility. In 2021, they were named a Sundance Ignite Fellow, and they recently became a member of the Explorers Club, a historic institution dedicated to scientific and artistic exploration through field discovery.

Crossroads Blues, developed in collaboration between Escape Route Films and Justice Jamal Jones, was chosen for its clarity of vision and refusal to compromise. The film bends genre, reimagines history, and approaches performance and desire without reducing them to a single frame. The result is unsettling, lush, and precise.

Find them here: @justicejamaljones