Titus Turner looks up to his older brother, Ronaldo King, in What You Gonna Do When the World’s on Fire?
WHAT YOU GONNA DO WHEN THE WORLD’S ON FIRE (Roberto Minervini, 2018)
Museum of the Moving Image
35th Ave. at 36th St., Astoria
Friday, December 20, 7:30
Series continues through January 12
718-777-6888
www.movingimage.us
www.kimstim.com
Roberto Minervini follows up his Texas Trilogy – The Passage, Low Tide, and Stop the Pounding Heart – with the powerful sociopolitical call to action What You Gonna Do When the World’s on Fire?, which is screening December 20 in the Museum of the Moving Image’s annual series “Curators’ Choice,” a collection of the best works of the past twelve months, which curator Eric Hynes and assistant curator Edo Choi call “among the best film years in memory.”
What You Gonna Do When the World’s on Fire? is shot in sharp, distinctive black-and-white by cinematographer Diego Romero Suarez-Llanos so that it looks like a fictional work from the civil rights era, but it is an all-too-real documentary that shows what’s happening in the US today, even though far too many Americans would deny the inherent realities the movie depicts. Italian-born director Minervini, who is based in the American south, tells four poignant stories steeped in oppression: Judy Hill is struggling to get by, running a bar that has become an important meeting place for the Tremé community while also caring for her elderly mother, Dorothy; Ashlei King hopes that her young sons, fourteen-year-old Ronaldo King and nine-year-old Titus Turner, come back safe after going out to play in a junkyard; Mardi Gras Indian Chief Kevin Goodman melds black and Native American traditions in changing times; and Krystal Muhammad and the New Black Panther Party for Self Defense protest the killings of two African American men at the hands of police.
The New Black Panther Party for Self Defense fights the power in What You Gonna Do When the World’s on Fire?
Beautifully edited by Marie-Hélène Dozo, the film, which was shot in Louisiana and Mississippi in the summer of 2017, captures the continuing results of institutionalized, systemic racism and income inequality in the United States. “We’ve been set free, but we’re still being slaves,” Judy Hill proclaims. “Nowadays, people don’t fight; they like to shoot,” Ronaldo teaches Titus. What You Gonna Do When the World’s on Fire? is the kind of film that should be widely seen, including in schools around the country, to highlight the everyday impact of racial injustice. There are no confessionals in the film, no so-called experts discussing socioeconomic issues; instead, it’s real people, struggling to survive and fighting the status quo and America’s failure to effectively face and deal with its original sin. The most controversial section involves the New Black Panther Party for Self Defense, the members of which march through town declaring, “Black power!” When they face off against the police, they make some arguable choices, but what’s most important is what has taken place to even put them in that situation. There’s a good reason why the title, What You Gonna Do When the World’s on Fire?, is framed as a question, one that every one of us should look in the mirror and answer for ourselves.
Judy Hill struggles to get by in poignant, important film by Roberto Minervini What You Gonna Do When the World’s on Fire?
“Curators’ Choice” continues through January 12 with such other 2019 popular and little-seen gems as Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time . . . in Hollywood, James Gray’s Ad Astra, Kent Jones’s Diane, and the director’s cut of Ari Aster’s Midsommar and features Q&As with Jones, Aster, Penny Lane (Hail Satan?), Alex Ross Perry (Her Smell), Brett Story (The Hottest August), Nathan Silver, Cindy Silver, and Jarred Alterman from Cutting My Mother, and Julia Reichert, Steve Bognar, and Jeff Reichert from American Factory.
