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:
In an invisible territory at the margins of society lives a wounded community who face the threat of being forgotten by political institutions and having their rights as citizens trampled. Disarmed veterans, taciturn adolescents, drug addicts trying to escape addiction through love; ex-special forces soldiers still at war with the world; floundering young women and future mothers; and old people who have not lost their desire to live. Through this hidden pocket of humanity, renowned documentarian Roberto Minervini opens a window to the abyss of today's America.
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 socio-political 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: 92 min
In person: Roberto Minervini
"Whatever genre it belongs to, The Other Side is powerful and disturbing." —Glenn Kenny, The New York Times
"A soul-draining, feature-length look at the bastard stepchildren of the American Dream." —Peter Debruge, Variety
"An unflinching look at the unwholesome underbelly that, to the rest of the country’s chagrin, defines the Deep South." —Amanda Waltz, The Film Stage
"Minervini deserves credit for going where few high-minded filmmakers have gone before, revealing a side of Americana rarely seen onscreen." —Jordan Mintzer, The Hollywood Reporter
"The Other Side is an immersive, almost harrowingly naturalistic plunge into the lives of marginal Louisianans obsessed with guns, drugs and belligerent resentments" —Godfrey Cheshire , RogerEbert.com
(Available to download after screening date)