WHAT YOU GONNA DO WHEN THE WORLD’S ON FIRE?: A Personal Look At Poverty With Powerful Results

There’s never been a filmmaker so humanist in a world of politicization as Roberto Minervini, whose latest documentary What You Gonna Do When the World’s on Fire? explores the lives of black Americans living on the down and out of New Orleans. It’s nothing sentimental for Minervini, as he once again manages to capture an impression of life lived in his unique docu-fiction style.

On the Fringes

What You Gonna Do When the World’s on Fire weaves itself through a triptych of characters all “played” by themselves — a bar owner as she struggles to make ends meet in Tremé, a pair of brothers where the older balances his own coming of age with a sense of fatherhood to his younger sibling in place of their father, and a faction of the New Black Panther Party fighting on the streets for equity.

“Whatever color you are don’t matter, it’s what race you are.” The older brother, filling the time before they have to go inside when the street lights come on, tries to pass off that wisdom he’s learned in his short life. In one of the film’s most poignant moments, he takes his brother out back and teaches him how to fight, but after a while even starts to feel a futility to it. “Nowadays, people don’t like to fight. They like to shoot.”

The people of Minervini’s film exist beyond precarity, instead balancing on an all-too-real edge between life and death, each of them revealing a distinct aspect of black poverty in America. The brothers realize and come to terms with their current condition, with their dream being to hop a train and run away from it all. The bar owner faces the systemic economic effects of poverty, knowing there’s nowhere to go, doing everything she possibly can to raise herself up. The New Black Panther Party members come to the conclusion that all they can do is take matters into their own hands to tear down their deeply unjust and violent world, doing everything from feeding the homeless to investigating hate crimes and race based murders.

But What You Gonna Do is less a directly political film than it seems on paper, and is more interested in it’s subjects lives as lived, only to have that itself convey something to the audience.

A Style All His Own

Shot in striking black and white by his frequent collaborator Diego Romero, the film and the duo stick to a 50mm lens for the shoot, forcing the camera to stay close. During the intimate scenes, it’s like the audience is just another in the room, a silent spectator living with the film’s characters. Oftentimes, the film can feel like it is slipping away from documentary, not into fiction, but something real. Only a few moments late in the film snap us out of this spell and remind us we are watching a film.

Minervini’s approach is wholly unique to any filmmaker working today, the closest comparison being Chloé Zhao’s first two films in which she took real people on the Pine Ridge Reservation and transformed their lives into narrative features. Minervini aims much nearer to documentary, and while he oftentimes stages total recreations of events as recounted by his subjects, the line quickly becomes blurred as him and his skeleton crew effectively live amongst those they are following. What You Gonna Do exists in this blur, creating something that feels more like memory than documentary.

Broader Strokes

While we mostly follow the three main sets of characters, What You Gonna Do opens with a seemingly unrelated vignette of a man in ceremonial Native American dress leading a group through New Orleans. The man is sparsely shown throughout the film, but does lead it out, just as he led it in. This is not unlike Minervini’s previous film The Other Side (2015), where the very beginning and final sequence seem to have no literal relationship to the film’s main subjects.

If there is a political statement in Minervini’s films, it comes through in the editing. Perhaps, by linking the struggle of black Americans to the marching forth of a Native American man, a broader historical statement can be gleaned.

It’s unfortunate that Minervini’s films have gone so underseen, with virtually no theatrical screenings beyond festival runs. With most of the films not even making it to physical release, they’re forced to live a life on digital platforms like Amazon Prime with the occasional bump from Mubi. There is no one out there quite like Minervini, who hopefully one day will be looked back on as one of, if not the most, important documentarians of the decade, and What You Gonna Do is a stunning example of this importance.

What are you going to do when the world’s on fire? What is your favorite documentary? Let us know in the comments!

What You Gonna Do When the World’s on Fire was released in the US on August 16th and is currently awaiting a digital release.