Part of "A More Perfect Union: The Films of Roberto Minervini," a complete retrospective of the Italian-born director's features running from June 13-23 at 2220 Arts + Archives and Brain Dead Studios. Copies of Textur #7: Roberto Minervini, a monograph published for the 2024 Viennale, will be available to purchase at each screening.
About the film:
Winter 1862. In the midst of the Civil War, the US Army sends a company of volunteer soldiers to the western territories, with the task of patrolling the unchartered borderlands. As their mission ultimately changes course, the meaning behind their engagement begins to elude them.
About the book:
The seventh edition of the ongoing publication series Textur is dedicated to the Italian-born director Roberto Minervini, who has been based in the USA for more than 20 years. Shifting gently between feature film and documentary, his films deal with the sociopolitical complexities of his adopted country and are interested in the people who otherwise remain invisible, marginalized or unheard. In addition to a major interview, the volume edited by Eva Sangiorgi and James Lattimer contains a conversation between the Italian filmmaker Michelangelo Frammartino and Minervini, texts by his editor Marie-Hélène Dozo and his producers Paolo Benzi and Denise Ping Lee, exclusive images, sketches and notes from his film shoots as well as contributions by Mark Peranson, Payal Kapadia, Jessica Sarah Rinland, Rachael Rakes, Goffredo Fofi, and Pablo Marín.
About the director:
Roberto Minervini is an Italian-born film director, who lives and works in the U.S. He is widely considered to be one of the world’s most prominent auteurs of narrative documentaries, which combine dramatized and observational elements. In 2007, he moved to Texas, where he directed three feature films, The Passage, Low Tide, and Stop the Pounding Heart, a Texas Trilogy that focused on rural communities in the American South. He then went on to direct two feature films set in Louisiana, The Other Side and What You Gonna Do When the World’s on Fire?, shifting to the political realm of American society and touching on social injustice. In more recent years, he has begun to produce the work of other visionary filmmakers through his production company Pulpa Film, including Payal Kapadia’s first fiction film All We Imagine as Light and Lisandro Alonso’s Eureka. Minervini’s latest film, The Damned—which won the Un Certain Regard Best Director Prize at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival—is his first fiction film set in the 1860s during the American Civil War.
TRT: 89 min
In person: Roberto Minervini
"Mesmerizing. A quietly intoxicating and existentially real war movie." —Jordan Mintzer, The Hollywood Reporter
"A melancholy, almost subervsive, mood piece... There’s a haunting quality to this handsomely filmed account of the slow attrition of faith, hope and purpose." —Wendy Ide, Screen International
"A welcome addition to an oeuvre consistently attuned to the way Americans think about faith, class and community, whether or not the Americans in question realize it themselves." —Peter Debruge, Variety
"Minervini, bringing his documentary spirit as an asset to historical fiction, continues to be—beyond the vicissitudes and contempt—one of the most uncompromising and lucid filmmakers today." —Diego Batlle, Otros Cines
"The Damned punctuates the routines of Army service and violent eruptions of wartime with the soul-baring conversations of Minervini’s nonfiction. Those chats (about war, religion, being a man) feel unnervingly candid, like reading someone’s journal from the time, probably a direct result of the collaborative techniques Minervini preserves from his work with his subjects in documentary." —Nicholas Rapold, Filmmaker Magazine
(Available to download after screening date)