“Nobody thinks about you, buddy. Everyone has abandoned you,” one man says to another at one point in The Other Side (Louisiana), an inhospitable and deeply human portrait of that North American state. Perhaps American politicians have long abandoned a large part of the country’s population, but Roberto 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 entirely dedicated to portraying their lives and frustrated desires, films that are hybrids between documentary and fiction, with a hyperrealism as strange as it is poetic, which at the same time hides a captivating emotion. Construction workers, minimum wage employees, convicts, drug addicts, sex workers, rodeo-loving teenagers, young farmers in love, militiamen playing hooky, soldiers of cursed destiny… They are the shadow of the American dream, the chiaroscuro that makes the elitist triumphalism that the country has been repeating itself for years tremble, and also that savagery that evokes the myth of the geographical and phantasmagorical border of a nation consolidated in brutality. They all seem to seek answers to their personal situations among the images that Minervini —Focus D’A 2025— has filmed at his side using a camera that acts as an umbilical cord between him and the others, between the foreigner and the marginalized. Despite the rawness of these stories, Minervini is concerned with establishing bonds in all his films, showing the beauty and tyranny of what it means to live in community. It is impossible to overlook that his cinema is the result of a doubly external gaze and, precisely because of this, the proximity and commitment to the truth of these lives is of irreproachable honesty.
-Paula Arantzazu Ruíz
