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:
What You Gonna Do When the World’s on Fire? is the story of a community of black people in the American South during the summer 2017, when a string of brutal killings of young African American men sent shockwaves throughout the country. A meditation on the state of race in America, this film is an intimate portrait into the lives of those who struggle for justice, dignity, and survival in a country not on their side.
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: 123 min
"Teems with beauty, as Minervini shows what Black people have always done when the world is on fire: live, organize, protect one another, and keep our history at the forefront." —Tyler Montague, Film Comment
"The movie unfolds impressionistically. To call it a portrait of collective resilience is accurate, but that description shortchanges its richness on both human and historical scales." —Ben Kenisberg, The New York Times
"Filming in sharp black-and-white that bridges the past with the present, Minervini eschews didacticism and activism, focusing instead on the raw, emotional textures of his subjects. The results are often beautifully immersive." —Beatrice Loayza, The AV Club
"As close as Minervini seems to his subjects, both in terms of his camera movement and the sense of trust that allows him such intimate access, the movie doesn’t pretend to be anything but observational. What makes Minervini such a unique filmmaker is that he understands how to observe in a way that heightens his audience’s attentiveness without telling us what to think."— Adam Nayman, The Ringer
" A so-called 120-minute 'documentary' lyrically shot in gorgeous, high-contrast black and white; a political film that has as some of its subjects actual political activists (the New Black Panthers), but in itself isn’t activist, rather humanist—because [Minervini] is a filmmaker, not an activist, or maybe it’s more appropriate to call him a magician. Because what he actually is doing, and I mean this in all honesty, is in fact magic." —Mark Peranson, Cinema Scope
(Available to download after screening date)