Focus

Roberto Minervini : Wild America

“There’s no one thinking about you, man. Everyone’s abandoned you,” one guy tells another as they discuss Hillary Clinton at one point in Louisiana ( The Other Side ) (2015), the fourth feature film by Roberto Minervini (Fermo, 1970) and a bleak and deeply human portrait of that southern state. American politicians may have long since abandoned a good part of the country’s population, but Minervini ‘s cinema has not forgotten them, because the impoverished are the material with which the Italian settled in Texas has forged a cinematic career completely dedicated to portraying their lives and frustrated desires, hybrid films between documentary and fiction, of a hyperrealism as strange as it is poetic, which hides, in turn, a captivating emotion.

Construction workers, employees who earn the minimum wage, inmates who have just left prison, drug addicts, sex workers, teenagers making a name for themselves in the rodeo world, young farmers in love, gun-toting thugs playing militia, soldiers with a cursed destiny in the midst of the Civil War… They are the shadow of the American dream, the chiaroscuro that shakes the elitist triumphalism that the country has been repeating to itself for years, and also that savagery that evokes the myth of the geographical and phantasmal frontier of a nation founded on brutality and untamability. All of them, as individuals and an amalgam of the country’s secret violence, seem to seek the answers to their personal situations among the images that Minervini has filmed with them using a camera that acts as an umbilical cord between one and the other, between the portraitist and the portrayed, the foreigner and the marginalized. Despite the harshness of these stories, Minervini is concerned with establishing ties and seeking connections in each and every one of his films, showing the beauty and tyranny of what it means to live in a community. It is impossible to ignore the fact that Minervini ‘s films are the result of a doubly external gaze, but, precisely because of that, the closeness and commitment to the truth of these lives is of an irreproachable honesty. Same direction device (shooting with non-professional actors first; working on the script later based on what was shot), same team of collaborators (Diego Romero Suárez Llamos as director of photography; Marie-Hélène Dozo as editor) and same demand with the stark reality of the world’s leading economic power.

In The Passage (2011), Minervini ‘s first film and the inaugural film of the so-called ‘Texas Trilogy’, Ana (Soledad St. Hilaire) has just discovered that she has lung cancer and that she has little time left. Minervini , together with Diego Romero’s camera, films his protagonist with an enveloping closeness, as if he were trying to console her. A trip in search of a healer, also fleeing from the loneliness of the disease, will put him in contact with Jack (Mean Gene Kelton ), an ex-convict, and Harold (Alan Lyddiard ), a peculiar British artist; two unexpected road-trip companions through the state’s wastelands with whom he will merge in a much-needed emotional embrace before reality imposes itself with all its inclemency.

It would be easy to frame The Passage and the bulk of Minervini ‘s films would be in a certain tradition of American documentary cinema led by Frederick Wiseman , if it were not for the fact that in Low Tide (2012), the logical continuation of the journey through his adopted Texas, he clearly reveals some of his European influences, from the Dardenne brothers to François Truffaut, since here he seems to have filmed his own The 400 Blows (1959) or Rosetta (1999) by presenting us with the summer of a teenage boy who lives with his single mother somewhere on the outskirts of Houston. Minervini and Romero’s camera captures the loneliness of the boy, whose name we will never know, in his daily life: he cleans his house, does laundry, spends time in a nearby trailer park, which serves as a refuge for him, and takes care of his mother, who comes home increasingly drunk when she goes out with her friends after long days of poorly paid work in a hospital. The lack of dialogue and a strict montage, although at times full of warmth, do not invite us to guess the drastic climax of this Antoine Doinel of the American lumpen, although Minervini remains faithful to the original story in which he seems to look and gives us another overwhelming maritime scene as a horizon of hope.

The protagonists of Stop the Pounding Heart (2013) (D’A 2014), Minervini ‘s first film to be presented at Cannes, although out of competition, had already appeared in The Passage , the third work in the Texan trilogy, brings them back to weave another delicate and hypersensitive vision of adolescence through the tribulations of Sara, the eldest daughter of a family of fundamentalist Christian farmers who educate their children at home to keep them safe from the bad influences of the outside world. The girl feels that she is falling in love with Colby , a young rodeo rider, and her desire precipitates her questioning the role of subjugation that her family has in store for her in the future. The emotional magma that shakes the innocence of the protagonist contrasts, therefore, with the bucolic environment in which she moves, filmed with a silence, a luminosity and a rhythm akin to the transcendental spirit of Terrence Malick and contemporary epigones such as David Lowery or Joshua Overbay .

Although Minervini would say goodbye to the lights and shadows of his adopted Texas, his fixation on the otherness with which he has been building his filmography will take a more radical direction when he moves to Louisiana ( The Other Side ) , premiered in Un Certain Regard Regard de Cannes 2015 and presented at D’A 2016. We are faced with the portrait of Mark Kelley and his swampy life, but also with an outline of the surreptitious violence that is about to lead to Donald Trump’s first presidential term. The only thing that unites one and the other community, that of the marginalized and that of the supremacists, a territory ready for anarchy and illegality in which one can let oneself be carried away by the flow of narcotics or organize military tests and shooting exercises while dreaming of blowing the head off the former president Barack Obama. A look into the abyss of American identity, in any of its manifestations, which could only be answered by its activist counterpart, What You Gonna Do When the World’s on Fire ? (2018), a vision of justice, dignity and the fight against racism, premiered in the Official Section of the Venice Film Festival and presented at D’A 2019.

In What you gonna do when the world’s on fire ? Minervini deviates towards a stylized black and white to portray for the first time in his filmography an African-American community, just when a series of violent crimes and a brutal murder committed by the Ku Klux Klan have ignited the first flames of violence. We are in 2017 and Minervini presents us with three stories that intersect within the framework of this tense context: that of Judy, the charismatic owner of a bar in the dangerous suburbs of New Orleans who is about to be evicted; Ronaldo and Titus , two brothers who try to pass the time in the midst of this climate of conflict; and the activities of the New Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, which tries to mobilize the black community in favor of resistance on the eve of the preparations for the carnival-like Mardi Gras.

The sins of the past resonate in the structural discrimination suffered by the African-American community in the United States, but the shockwave of a country governed by the law of the strongest also reaches other communities and sensibilities. In The Damned (2024), Minervini once again deviates from the path he has taken in an even more radical turn than in his previous film to propose a fictional study of another community displaced from the centre of American life, but no longer in the present but in the historical past of the United States, at the founding moment of the Civil War. Like Dino Buzzati ‘s novel The Tartar Steppe , The Damned is a war film about waiting as the true experience of war and about the questions that soldiers ask themselves while awaiting the arrival of the enemy. With the addition of Carlos Alfonso Corral, replacing Diego Rodriguez in the tasks of photography direction, and relying on the 2:1 format, Minervini gradually observes a dozen men of different ages, origins and classes, an infantry that must protect new ideals and a territory, with whose values, still under construction, they do not know whether to identify. Meditative close-ups, combined with solitary landscapes and wide-angle shots from behind, accentuate the calm and menace on which this minimal and particularly lyrical western hinges. The Italian filmmaker won the Best Director Award at Un Certain Regard . Regard from the 2024 Cannes Film Festival for this film, which not only demonstrated the elasticity of a particularly malleable cinematographic genre, but also the author’s commitment, also from fiction, to the dilemmas of a territory constantly in denial of its history, its present and, therefore, of itself.

With the support