What You Gonna Do When the World's on Fire?

Director: Roberto Minervini

2018 / 123min / DCP

Coming to prominence with a series of distinctive documentaries focused principally on white, rural working-class subjects in the American south, Italian-born, Texas-based Minervini entered new territory with What You Gonna Do When the World’s on Fire?—his first film in black and white, and his first to focus principally on African American subjects, Louisianans reeling in the wake of what appears to have been a race-related murder. Minervini’s connection to Pasolini can be felt in their shared interest in underclass subjects, and here to Mamma Roma specifically through the presence of a maternal female character—in Minervini’s film, July Hill, a resolute New Orleans bar owner—who provides the film a moral center of gravity.