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.
Q&A with Roberto Minervini and film critic Peter Debruge to follow the film.
About the film:
In writer/director Roberto Minervini’s feature debut—the first in the filmmaker's Texas Trilogy—Ana (Soledad St. Hilaire), a middle-aged woman living alone in a border town, is told she has terminal cancer. With just weeks to live, she asks new acquaintance—and ex-con—Jack (Mean Gene Kelton) to drive her to a faith healer in Marfa, Texas. They are joined on the road by friendly British artist Harold (Alan Lyddiard). Though the trio have few commonalities in worldview or life experience, time spent together brings out unexpected affinities. What might have been a sentimental medley of clichés emerges as a graceful character study, with Minervini revealing a keen ear for regional expression and a generosity of spirit comparable to Sayles and Linklater.
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: 85 min
In person: Roberto Minervini
"Proves that there’s no one way of presenting a road trip movie... The Passage is much like an iceberg in that there is much, much more going on under the surface." —Simon Prior, SimonPrior.com
"A remarkable road movie... The Passage is impressive due to its semi-documentary nature and the amateur actors around Soledad St. Hilaire, but especially because of Minervini’s fine sense of the harsh reality of America’s Deep South and his empathy for the people." —Michael Pekler, Viennale
"Beginning with his 'Texas Trilogy, ' Minervini has chosen to make nonscripted films with nonactors that he has gotten to know well. He turns his camera on them, moves closer, and doesn’t turn it off until he has captured something that is startling to us and occasionally surprises even him. You ask yourself: How did he get that on film?" —Danny Peary, Film Ink
"Minervini's closeness with his subjects allows the director to tow the line between documentary and fiction. Especially in earlier films like The Passage, we see the director utilise his subjects as cameras themselves. Minervini empathetically and invisibly gets inside these people and uses their lives as his own lens in to the unfamiliar terrain." —Jonas Jacobs, POV Magazine
"[Minervini's films are] difficult to classify, like the filmmaker himself. His filmography begins with the 'Texas Trilogy,' where he presents portraits of marginalised characters and communities in the southern United States through powerful crudeness. These three films also mark a characteristic way of working for the director: always with the same team, always with non-professional actors, always taking the audience to the shadows of the American dream." —Tabakalera.eus
(Available to download after screening date)