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

In his lat­est non-fic­tion film, Ital­ian-born direc­tor Rober­to Min­ervi­ni explores the sociopo­lit­i­cal make up of the Amer­i­can South where he has been res­i­dent for over a decade. Unlike his pre­vi­ous films, which arose from pre-exist­ing rela­tion­ships he had with locals, this new film was born off his desire to dig deep­er into the real­i­ty of racism in America.

Min­ervi­ni has spo­ken open­ly about how close he is to the peo­ple he films, and here once more he takes the time to build a gen­uine, life-long rap­port with var­i­ous cit­i­zens of Louisiana and Mis­sis­sip­pi. He is deter­mined to pre­serve the dig­ni­ty of his sub­jects, and col­lab­o­rates with them at every stage of the film­mak­ing process. He uses long takes which func­tion not as a force­ful agi­ta­tor but rather as a cat­a­lyst: his role is to gen­er­ate moments that speak to a wider reality.

Min­ervi­ni fol­lows three sets of peo­ple who are pre­sent­ed in sep­a­rate but grad­u­al­ly align­ing chap­ters: Judy Hill is a dynam­ic mid­dle-aged woman strug­gling to keep her busi­ness afloat despite sys­temic pres­sures and a dif­fi­cult past; Ronal­do and Titus are two teenage broth­ers hang­ing out and learn­ing to avoid the kind of trou­ble suf­fered by Hill; and final­ly, the mem­bers of the New Black Pan­ther Par­ty, filmed as they protest and attempt to gath­er infor­ma­tion about the bare­ly-inves­ti­gat­ed series of bru­tal mur­ders of African-Amer­i­cans in their neighbourhood.

With its close-up-heavy, fly-on-the-wall approach, What You Gonna Do… resem­bles ciné­ma vérité́. But by admit­ting his per­son­al involve­ment and col­lab­o­ra­tion, Min­ervi­ni is deny­ing both this sup­pos­ed­ly ​“objec­tive” point of view, as well as its oppo­site – the idea of a ​“home movie” cre­at­ed between friends. As its title sug­gests, this slow-burn film cap­tures the lives of its sub­jects from a polit­i­cal angle, one that is inex­tri­ca­ble from the iden­ti­ties of these indi­vid­u­als as black peo­ple liv­ing in a still-racist South, but also from the per­spec­tive of Min­ervi­ni as a white, Euro­pean outsider.

The film doesn’t tell you any­thing you haven’t heard on the news: when Ronal­do and Titus’ moth­er warns them not to stay out after night­fall to avoid get­ting shot, it feels as if Min­ervi­ni was betray­ing a typ­i­cal foreigner’s naivety about racism in the South. But his atten­tion to the man­ner in which peo­ple speak about their con­di­tions (in one har­row­ing and touch­ing scene, Ronal­do explains to his younger broth­er the dif­fer­ence between race and skin colour) and their expe­ri­ences with the sys­tem soon reveals this naivety to be of the good kind – a com­pas­sion­ate curios­i­ty about the Other.

The sequences fol­low­ing the New Black Pan­ther Par­ty feel par­tic­u­lar­ly remote, as the activists, in their sig­na­ture attire and filmed (like the rest of the movie) in black and white, seem almost like relics of the 1960s. But here, too, it is Minervini’s relent­less inter­est in and com­pas­sion towards these peo­ple, despite his dif­fer­ence, that helps What You Gonna Do… tran­scend the tra­di­tion­al sep­a­ra­tion between black sub­jects and white jour­nal­ists. A heat­ed protest near the end of the film proves that the Pan­thers’ fight is far from over.

By build­ing up to this explo­sive but hard­ly sur­pris­ing moment, Min­ervi­ni demon­strates, as though unin­ten­tion­al­ly, that it is only because of our culture’s inabil­i­ty to see the present as a con­tin­u­a­tion of the past, and every per­son as equal­ly real, that one could ever tru­ly believe the Black Pan­thers, and racism, to be irrel­e­vant in 2019.