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

Italian documentary filmmaker Roberto Minervini focuses on members of an African-American community in New Orleans who face different levels of existential threats. There are three main narratives in this feature, with the most dramatic involving Judy Hill, a 50-year-old who overcame sexual abuse and drug addiction to open a bar, but is facing the potential loss of her business. Her story is interwoven with 14-year-old Ronaldo King and his 9-year-old half-brother Titus Turner, and their mother who frets over the rise of neighborhood shootings. The third storyline follows a local chapter of the New Black Panther Party for Self Defense, which seeks rally public support in protest of the shooting of an African-American man by a white police officer in Baton Rouge. Interspersed throughout the film are a group of Mardi Gras Indians, who bring a degree of distracting magic to a grim urban setting. The stories involving Hill and the young half-brothers are the film’s strongest points, with the subjects offering a harsh consideration of the emotional challenges that frame – and, often, threaten to suffocate – their daily existence. The New Black Panther Party segments, in contrast, feel weaker due to seeming impotence of the activists trying to bring together a grassroots level of outrage. But the most startling element of the film is cinematographer Diego Romero Suarez-Llanos’ strikingly artistic black-and-white camerawork, which is often visually stunning but frequently seems out of place in capturing gritty life stories. An optional purchase. (P. Hall)